Déconstruire l’idéologie dominante
Shmuel
Trigano
Le saviez-vous ? 900 000 Juifs
ont été exclus ou expulsés des Etats arabo-musulmans entre 1940 et 1970.
L’histoire de la disparition du
judaïsme en terres d’islam est la clef d’une mystification politique de
grande ampleur qui a fini par gagner toutes les consciences. Elle fonde
le récit qui accable la légitimité et la moralité d’Israël en l’accusant
d’un pseudo « péché originel ».
La fable
La fable est simpliste : le
martyre des Juifs européens sous le nazisme serait la seule
justification de l’État d’Israël. Sa « création » par les Nations Unies
aurait été une forme de compensation au lendemain de la guerre.
Cependant, elle aurait entraîné une autre tragédie, la « Nakba », en
dépossédant les Palestiniens de leur propre territoire.
Dans le meilleur des cas,
ce récit autorise à tolérer que cet État subsiste pour des causes
humanitaires, malgré sa culpabilité congénitale. Cette narration a, de
fait, tout pour sembler réaliste. Elle surfe sur le sentiment de
culpabilité d’une Europe doublement responsable : de la Shoah et de
l’imposition coloniale d’Israël à un monde arabe innocent.
Dans le pire des cas, cette narration ne voit en Israël qu’une
puissance colonialiste qui doit disparaître. Ce qui explique l’intérêt
d’accuser sans cesse Israël de génocide et de nazisme : sa seule «
raison d’être » (la Shoah) est ainsi sapée dans son fondement. La «
Nakba » est le pendant de la Shoah.
La synthèse politiquement
correcte de ces deux positions extrêmes est trouvée dans la
doctrine de l’État bi-national ou du « retour » des « réfugiés » qui
implique que les Juifs d’Israël mettent en oeuvre leur propre
destruction en disparaissant dans une masse démographique
arabo-musulmane.
Les implications
Ce discours manichéen a
plusieurs implications symboliques et idéologiques :
- Il délégitime l’État d’Israël et justifie sa destruction
- Il implique que les Juifs ne sont pas un peuple et qu’ils n’ont aucun
lien avec la « Palestine »
- Il entraîne que leur constitution en nation est en soi une violence et
une mystification
- Il leur interdit la jouissance du droit à l’autodétermination qui est
le privilège de tout groupe humain quel qu’il soit.
- Il accuse le sionisme d’avoir mis fin à la « coexistence pacifique »
judéo-arabe : il aurait été responsable du départ des Juifs des pays
arabo-musulmans
- Il innocente par principe les Palestiniens et les Etats
arabo-musulmans
-Il « autochtonise » les « Palestiniens » alors que l’adjectif «
palestinien » désignait auparavant les Juifs du Yichouv. La « Palestine
» d’aujourd’hui est, en effet, une invention récente qui date des années
1970.
Or,
ce récit s’expose
à une contradiction majeure
- La majorité de la population israélienne n’est ni originaire d’Europe
ni rescapée de la Shoah, et ce, dès les années 1950. Originaire des pays
arabo-musulmans, elle est partie prenante de l’histoire politique et
humaine de la région.
La mystification
Le destin de cette population
est significatif : entre les années 1940 et 1970 elle a été expulsée ou
exclue et poussée au départ. 900 000 Juifs d’alors ont dû fuir des pays
où ils étaient présents bien avant l’invasion islamique du VII° siècle:
600 000 se sont réinstallés en Israël, le reste, en majorité en France.
- Dans leur grande majorité,
ces populations ne sont pas parties volontairement mais sous le coup
d’un véritable « statut des Juifs », d’un antisémitisme d’État, souvent
systématique, soutenu par un arsenal de lois et de règlements.
- Cet événement massif et
considérable, concernant 10 pays, sur une longue période, commençant
dans les années 1920 pour certaines régions, est l’objet d’une véritable
mystification qui prend la forme du mythe de la symbiose judéo-arabe que
toute l’histoire dément, y compris l’âge andalou.
- Ce mythe n’est pas inoffensif
: il est la couverture d’un projet de destruction de l’État d’Israël et
connaît une diffusion mondiale, dans les pays les plus éloignés de
l’arène du conflit. Il retentit sur la condition des Juifs dans les pays
occidentaux et sur la réception de l’islam en leur sein.
Il est
temps de restaurer le récit historique juif !
Ce n’est pas une question de
mémoire, ni de dignité ou de reconnaissance, mais une question politique
qui engage la justice.
Car les populations concernées
sont toujours vivantes : la plus grande partie des Juifs du monde
arabo-musulman constitue la majorité des citoyens israéliens et des
Juifs de France.
Ils ont été victimes de
violences, de graves spoliations économiques et financières de la part
des nouveaux Etats arabes.
L’histoire des 40 dernières
années a montré que les passer sous silence se retournait nécessairement
contre elles.
Leur présence en Israël n’est
pas une cause humanitaire – même si leur expulsion en fit des réfugiés
contraints de quitter leur pays et d’abandonner leurs biens. Réfugiés,
ils le furent clairement au Yémen, en Irak, en Egypte, en Libye.
Ailleurs, ils le furent objectivement si partir précipitamment, sous la
menace, en abandonnant ses biens, définit la condition de réfugié.
L’enjeu inavoué
- Les Juifs du monde arabe
constituaient une nation dominée, assignée au statut infâme de dhimmi.
La seule tolérance qu’ils connurent dans ces pays fut l’époque coloniale
où ils échappèrent à cette condition dégradante de parias.
- Il faut voir dans l’immigration de ces populations en Israël le
processus d’autodétermination d’une nation dominée du monde
arabo-musulman au moment même où le nationalisme arabe conduisait à la
création d’Etats qui n’existaient pas auparavant.
- Cette autodétermination s’identifiait naturellement avec le sionisme
en quête d’auto-émancipation.
- C’est ainsi que l’existence d’Israël et le sionisme sont perçus dans
la perspective du monde arabo-musulman : comme la rébellion d’une nation
dominée contre la loi de l’islam et la oumma. C’est la cause
unique du conflit israélo-arabe.
- La Palestine n’a jamais été une entité politique, culturelle,
identitaire. Il n’y a pas de « Palestine » avant l’instauration du
mandat britannique par la Société des Nations, en 1920. Une partie des
Palestiniens sont des immigrés du monde arabe, installés là, à la fin du
XIX° siècle et au début du XX°, favorisés par la politique ottomane et
attirés par la prospérité économique, apportée par les Juifs. Ils sont
au plus aussi « palestiniens » que les Juifs. Yasser Arafat comme Edward
Saïd étaient des Egyptiens.
C’est un
tout autre paysage historique et politique
qui transparaît sous la chape de plomb de la
mystification.
- L’État d’Israël, reconnu en
1948 par le Conseil de sécurité, est aussi légitime que les États
arabes, pure invention post-coloniale. Ils n’existaient pas auparavant.
Avant la colonisation européenne, leurs territoires étaient sous le
pouvoir colonial - mais musulman - de l’empire ottoman.
- Il n’a pas de dette envers les Palestiniens. Un échange de populations
s’est produit à cette époque d’après guerre : en Europe pour environ 18
000 000 de personnes (dont le déplacement vers l’Allemagne de 12 000 000
de ressortissants d’origine allemande, provenant de 5 pays) ; en Asie,
pour les 12,5 millions d’Indous et de Pakistanais à la suite de la
sécession du Pakistan musulman en 1947-1948. Rappelons le transfert
avant-guerre de 1,3 millions de Grecs et de 400 000 Turcs, de 200 000
Bulgares en 1923-1933, et combien d’autres échanges de populations dans
le monde entier. Parmi elles, 900.000 Juifs et 600.000
Palestiniens.
- Par contre, la dette arabe est réelle: les biens juifs spoliés sont
500 fois supérieurs à ceux des Palestiniens.
- Les Palestiniens et les États arabes sont les seuls responsables de
leur situation :
* Ils ont systématiquement
refusé tous les partages de la Palestine mandataire alors que les
Juifs l’acceptaient.
* Un Etat palestinien s’est néanmoins déjà créé sur les deux tiers
de la Palestine : la Jordanie. 75% de sa population est «
palestinienne », même si le pouvoir est aux mains d’une minorité
bédouine qui n’hésita pas à massacrer les « réfugiés palestiniens»
lors du dramatique « Septembre noir » de 1970 (10 000 morts, 110 000
blessés).
* C’est la « Transjordanie » (créée en 1922 par l’empire
britannique) qui a occupé et annexé les territoires de Judée et
Samarie et Jérusalem-Est lors d’une guerre de conquête en 1947-1948.
Elle devînt alors la « Jordanie » et les territoires occupés, la «
Cisjordanie ». Aucun mouvement de libération palestinien ne se leva
contre cette occupation, ni contre celle de la bande de Gaza par
l’Egypte. La « Palestine » n’était pas encore née.
* Les réfugiés palestiniens ne sont pas innocents : ils étaient
partie prenante de l’agression des États arabes contre Israël. Leur
départ ou expulsion est directement lié à cette situation.
* Les Juifs des 10 pays arabo-musulmans, n’étaient pas sur le
terrain du conflit armé, ni ne constituaient une puissance menaçant
les États arabes où ils résidaient.
- Les Etats arabes n’ont pas
intégré les réfugiés palestiniens, à l’inverse d’Israël pour ses
réfugiés, pour en faire des foyers de guerre permanents.
- Les Palestiniens, y compris les « modérés », refusent toujours
aujourd’hui le partage du territoire mandataire restant après la
création de la Transjordanie, en refusant à Israël le droit à son
caractère national juif, alors qu’ils définissent la Palestine comme
arabe et islamique, une terre où, selon leurs documents constitutionnels
et leur pratique, il n’y aurait plus aucun juif et où il n’y a déjà
quasiment plus de chrétiens.
- L’existence d’Israël pose le problème du droit de vivre en sujets
libre et souverains des nations non musulmanes dans l’aire musulmane.
L’extermination des Arméniens, d’abord par l’empire ottoman, puis par le
nouvel Etat turc a représenté la première répression d’une population
dhimmie en quête d’indépendance nationale. Il n’y a quasiment plus de
Juifs aujourd’hui dans le monde arabo-islamique et les chrétiens y sont
en voie de disparition.
L’enjeu
contemporain
Le critère déterminant
d’appréciation de la situation d’Israël n’est pas seulement la Shoah des
Juifs d’Europe mais celle dont le monde arabo-islamique menace l’Etat
d’Israël qui résume l’impasse tragique que le « statut des Juifs », mis
en oeuvre lors de la fondation des nouveaux États arabes, y annonçait et
que la création de l’État et sa victoire militaire ont suspendue.
Elle plane toujours sur sa tête
et la menace nucléaire iranienne lui donne toute sa crédibilité.
Le peuple juif n’est pas une
cause humanitaire mais un peuple de l’histoire et il a le droit à la
souveraineté sur une terre qui a connu trois Etats juifs et depuis la
plus haute antiquité, en un temps où ni le mot arabe, ni le mot islam
n’étaient encore connus. La condition des Juifs n’est pas vouée à la
marginalité ou à la soumission par on ne sait quelle fatalité.
Ces quelques vérités
constituent le B-A BA d’une vision saine et objective de la situation,
fondée sur la réalité des faits.
Tels sont les éléments historiques et politiques qui doivent inspirer le
discours juif aujourd’hui. Il est temps de reprendre l’initiative
morale, symbolique, idéologique du débat et du combat.
Document élaborant le modèle historique de la fin des communautés juives
en terres d’islam .
Bibliographie de l’auteur :
La fin du judaïsme en terres d’islam, (livre collectif sous sa
direction), Editions Denoël, 2009.
« L’exclusion des Juifs des pays arabes » (livre collectif sous sa
direction), Pardès, 28/2000, Editions In Press.
« La mémoire sépharade » (livre collectif sous la direction de Hélène et
Shmuel Trigano), Pardès, 34/2003.
Le Monde Sépharade, histoire et civilisation, (livre collectif
en 2 tomes sous sa direction), Le Seuil, 2006.
Jewish Peoplehood: a Unity of Opposites?*
Shmuel
Trigano**
*This paper was presented
at the President’s conference “Tomorrow 2009”, Jerusalem.
**Professor of sociology at Paris University, head of the Collège
des études juives de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle.
http://www.shmuel-trigano.fr/
There is a strange irony to
talk about unity of the Jewish people in times of what can be seen
realistically as a war of the Jews. But it is critical to analyze the
reason of this war in order to understand what is at stake when speaking
of unity in relation to the Jewish people.
Two camps
Among the larger part of today lost Jews, two camps confront each other.
Their importance is different if you are in diaspora or in Israel. One
is the ultra-orthodox trend and the other the post-something/anything
movement, post-Zionist, post-modernist, and so on.
The two camps aim at the same
target. They question de facto and de jure the existence and the
legitimacy of a Jewish people.
The main consequence of such a
position is that they are opposed to the will to sovereignty of this
people, as it is carried out by the State of Israel.
An Israeli-limited camp
This questioning is passive for the ultra-orthodox and mostly
Israel-limited. It expresses itself through a national inertia, a
default regarding the common life and a sectarian choice to be a counter
society.
In diaspora as in Israeli
society these two camps stand aside from the Jewish people, but the
phenomenon is much more developed in Israel where exists a real Jewish
society.
The Diasporic Pompeian
syndrom
On the contrary, for the other camp, this dispute is aggressive and
activist. It develops mainly in diaspora and gathers a large part of the
Jewish intelligentsia. Its harsh criticism of Israel and Jewish
community, its permanent denunciation of other Jewish intellectuals are
directed toward global society.
I call that the Pompeian
syndrome, when in the Second Temple period a political party asked
Romans ( and the consul Pompeius), to intervene in their internal
affairs in order to win on its rivals.
It is a nightmare to state the fact that the theoretical impulse of
their position comes from sectors of Israeli intelligentsia, academia
and medias.
The global background
These two ideological trends are fighting the rest of the Jewish people
on behalf of what they think to be Jewish ethics or on behalf their own
definition of Judaism as a religion.
This dispute occurs in a
political arena where the existence of a Jewish people is demonized and
delegimized.
I cannot stop thinking that
these two ideologies are the same ones that disarmed the Jews in the
decades preceding the Shoa and that they are the more vocal, the more
systematic and the more organized in today public arena, in this
prodigious period of an existent Jewish sovereign state.
That is to say that the
ideological political forces that are the most active today are those
who risked the life of the Jews, before the Shoa and the creation of the
state.
At stake: the Jews as a
people
What is at stake –as we see– is the Jewish condition as a people.
From one side, it is attacked
on behalf of a secular spiritualism, from the other side on behalf of a
religious sacred, on behalf of an immanent, inworldly principle or of a
transcendant, outworldly principle.
A twofold identity
This is an indication that there are two entries into Jewishness: as a
people or/and as a creed (will it be secular or religious).
This indication helps us to
understand that the Jewish people is twofold: a people and a church.
From one side, a specific
people. And not a people of peoples as the Christian Katholikos and the
Moslem Oumma.
From the other side, a church,
and not a clergy, as the Christian church.
This unique characteristic is
pretty well illustrated by the founding narrative of this people: the
Sinai revelation is granted to the whole of a people.
Cross relationships
This twofold identity implies that the people does not depend on the
state for the principle of its existence.
The people is greater than the
nation. That is why it can exist outside the Israeli state (diaspora).
It implies also that religion
is not limited to the needs of the people (as pretended Spinoza) but has
also a universal scope, significance.
Different expressions
This twofold dimension expresses itself in different ways:
Diaspora/Israel, religious/secular, Sefardi/Ashkenazi, people/nation,
State/religion.
In the same way, according to
the Book of Genesis, humanity which is only one, is basically man and
woman.
In quest of unity
It is upon such a joint of these two components that we have to lean in
order to think of unity as a unity of opposites.
The new situation created by
the existence of a State is that the federative element cannot be
exclusively the Book as it was in exile. The State has to be added.
If the Book is the federative
element of the church, the State became the federative element of the
people.
A challenge
We have to seek for a way to federate the State and the Book.
It is a totally new theological
problem for Judaism as a religion.
It is a totally new political
problem for Judaism as a people.
*This paper was presented at
the President’s conference “Tomorrow 2009”, Jerusalem.
**Professor of sociology at Paris University, head of the Collège des
études juives de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle.
http://www.shmuel-trigano.fr/
The
Future of European Jewry*
Prof. Shmuel Trigano
* A lecture at the International Conference
« European Jewry: A New Jewish Centre in the Making? »
(Berlin. May 10th – May 12th 2009), organized by the Moses
Mendelssohn Centre of European Jewish Studies in cooperation with
Centrum Judaicum, Klal Yisrael and Tel Aviv University .
Before asking ourselves if a
new Jewish center is appearing in the European Community, there is a
need to define the notion itself? What were the characteristics of the
Jewish centers which developed in different places of the world through
the ages? A comparison between them would show that their constitution
depended on a set of previous conditions.
Seven requisits
Seven “requisits” were
necessary to make the constitution of a Jewish center possible:
1)A sufficient demographic concentration of Jewish population
2)The appearence of a new power which is not yet consolidated nor
institutionalized
3)The need of this power, in its rising phase, for the Jews to help it
to organize itself, for two reasons:
a)As a minority, the Jews are a prey to a global hostility and that
situation secures a total fidelity that the new power cannot expect from
the majority population.
b)As a world network, the Jews have useful connections for this new
power throughout the world
4)A Jewish center will appear when a rising new Jewish elite will bring
about a top cultural production concerning Judaism or linked to Judaism
5) A Jewish center will appear when it will federate under its umbrella,
as Dubnow theorized it, a network of Jewish lesser centers in other
countries.
6) The Jewish center will last as long as a new elite of a same
(ethnic-religious) origin than the new power elite has not appeared.
7)As soon as this elite will be constituted, the decline of the Jewish
center will begin and the Jewish elite will be driven away from its
positions.
A strategical approach
These are the various criteria
which permit to assess if a new Jewish center is in the making in
Europa. Without dismissing such a possibility, I will express my
perplexity, not only when I consider the state of European Jewry today
(but I won’t do this examination here, it is indeed a secondary element)
but especially when I consider the strategical landscape of nowadays
Europe. I will take as a basis the presentation of the leaflet
presenting our conference.
The idea that Europe is on the way to a “coherent entity” seems to me a
pious wish, especially when this coherence is defined in the words of a
“political unification”.
The axis of any strategic
interpretation of the state of things in the united Europe is the
conjunction of two developments
a)The
destructuration/deconstruction of the European nation-states and
national identities upon which the European international structure was
built
b)The coming of an important Arab-Moslem immigration, the religion of
which did not go through the process of modernization.
In this background, the Jewish
condition underwent a very problematic change of strategic status. It is
important to remember its genealogy from the 1950es.
1)The Shoah has been a turning
point and the sign of the end of the Emancipation era, that is to say of
a status according to which the Jews were recognized as individual and
unidentified, anonymous, citizens. The Shoah was the tragic outbreak of
the collective and not voluntarist fate of the Jews transcending the
frontiers of the European national states (1).
2)A Jewish life has been again
possible in this continent (on a voluntary basis in the Free Europe and
a de facto imposed basis in the Communist Europe), only according to the
lesson (most of the time unconscious) drew from this cataclysmic event.
Jewish life was reconstructed on the basis, I won’t say of
“communities”, but of communal identities: the French Jewry case is from
this viewpoint the most illustrative case of the Jewish condition not in
de facto empires like the USSR but in Western nation-states, that is to
say in Western Europe.
The element of the Jewish
collective destiny has been re-integrated into the emancipated Jewries
as a datum of Jewish existence and also as a value (not only a tragedy,
except for assimilated Jews re-discovering their Jewishness because of
the Shoah).These identities took again on themselves the responsibility
for the Jewish people, without abandoning or neglecting nevertheless the
citizenry. They necessarily and naturally leaned on the new State of
Israel and more largely Zionism which constitute today the only instance
of an assumed, positive and constructive collective Jewish destiny,
contrasting with Jews’fate in the Shoah. This development was assumed
with no problem by Western Europe states so that it found its place
without a problem.
The societal change in
Europe
This situation totally changed
from the beginning of the 1990es (2nd Gulf war 1990-1991). A double
development explains it: a societal one and a social one.
The societal change concerns
the political structure of Europe. The progress towards the unification
of European states weakened the existing framework of the nation states.
The national identity they produced has been plunged into a vacuum and
confusion. At the same period occurred a huge immigration which stressed
the consequential disorientation and loss of the usual points of
reference. This double phenomenon had dire consequences for the Jewish
communities and for the integration of the immigrants.
Indeed, the framework of the
after-war Jewish communal identities has been shaken. Their identity has
been built onto the national identities and one of their efforts has
been to maintain a symbolical equilibrium: to balance their link with a
Jewish people on their loyalty to their nation-state. With the decline
of the European nation-states this type of identity has been ruined.
The leaflet of our conference
presents the Jewish community as a minority in a landscape defined
according to the criterium of ethnic and religious minorities. That is
indeed what is at stake. Is the status of minority desiderable for
European Jews? I am not sure: they will lose the protection of the
democratic citizenship which compensate for their numerical weakness,
especially when confronted with another powerful minority. The
majority’s choice will be done quickly and easily. Such a possibility
has been proved since the beginning of the 2000 years. One of the
lessons of those years was that the prevailing ideology of
muticulturalism is not a positive factor in the recognition of a Jewish
“minority” but, on the contrary, an incentive to anti-Semitism.
Concerning the immigrant
populations, the absence of a clear model of integration, because of the
decline of the nation states identities, has not helped their
integration and perhaps will not permit it totally in the future. We
might witness the constitution of an important semi-national Arab-Moslem
minority in the new Europe.
Last but not least, if the
nation-states have been shaken by the European unification it is not yet
clear what sort of state will be this United Europe. I can only see it
as a new Empire, but where is the emperor? There were no empire during
history without an emperor and a dynasty, a sacro-sanct figure, who, by
his charisma, was able to unify a chaos of peoples and languages.
The social change in Europe
These structural changes went
hand in hand with the second Gulf war in 1990-1991 and worsened with the
burst of the war in Iraq and especially the second intifada.
A virulent anti Americanism burst out in Europe and the second Intifada
was globalized on a world wide scale. From now on, the “Arab street”
passes through the European cities.
These were favorable
circumstances for the Arab-Moslem minority to climb on the European
political stage. The abusive criticism of Israel that developed in
Europe was a point of agreement between the new minority and European
public opinion. It was not only in fact a matter of opinion. There was a
real terrorist threat coming from the global Jihad, that the Madrid and
London attacks afterwards proved. The Jews felt that the condemnation of
Israel and the lenience concerning the antisemitic attacks were a sort
of appeasement related to this threat . In this circumstances, they
understood that civil society in a number of European countries and at
least the European Union had chosen the Arab camp. This choice can be
illustrated as much for the medias as for European diplomacy.
The new atmosphere in
Europe
The present failure of the
immigrant populations’ integration led to a new situation: the European
inner problems became spontaneously international and global problems.
The antisemitism coming from the Arab-Moslem milieu is not fighted as it
ought to be because there are threats on Europe coming from outside. If
it is possible to condemn harshly Israel and the Jewish communities, a
very cautious discourse is used to protect the Moslem world opinion.An
Orwellian language has even been invented not to name the things as they
are.
The hate of the Jews became the
meeting point between the extreme right, the extreme left and Islamic
fundamentalism. Globally the larger part of the Western European elites
are anti-zionist, the politically correct term for the new antisemitism.
Antizionism cannot define the criticism of the Israeli government’s
policies. It concerns the essence itself of the existence of the state
of Israel, its legitimacy.
Concretely, in Europe, what we have said of the post WWII development
showed that what is at stake with Zionism for European Jewries is the
Jewish people identity. To deligitimize the moral right of existence of
Israel as a state and as a Jewish state is to undermine the basis of the
restoration of a Jewish life in Europe after the Shoa and because of the
Shoa.
To summarize, Israel and the
Jews appear today in Europe as the main obstacle to the inner peace in
Europe. This is confirmed by all the European scale surveys of public
opinion.
All these causes explain why
the hypothesis of an ascent of a Jewish center in Europe seems to me
unlikely. There is no opportunity that the Jews will become the
privileged minority that the coming European power will need to impose
itself on the remains of the Nation-states powers (in the same way as
the new European nation states, according to Hannah Arendt in On
Antisemitism, needed in 19th century, a Jewish people to help them to
realize their major public projects).
The third symbolical change
The development I tried to
outline is not so clear to everyone. The situation is ambivalent. This
ambivalence is also one of the characteristics of the new anti-Semitism.
The current deligitimization of the State of Israel in European public
opinion, indeed, goes hand in hand with the celebration of the “Memory
of the Shoa”. This ambivalence explains how the new anti-Semitism can
accuse Israel on behalf of this memory.
In order to understand this
dialectical ideology it is important to understand the major symbolical
change that occurred in Europe during these 20 last years. After a long
latency period of psychological and intellectual repression, the memory
of the Shoa has been institutionalized and became even state-controlled.
A sanctuarization of the memory of the Shoa occured and this new deal
constitutes a major symbolical-ideological turning point for European
Jews.
If it is possible today to
deligitimize the State of Israel on behalf of the Shoa, it is because
this sanctuarization-sacralization was only possible at the expense of
the main lesson of the Shoa: the assomption of the Jewish destiny as a
people’s destiny. This state-controlled memory in Museums, memorials,
foundations has untied the so called “universal” victims from their
Jewishness and from the exterminated Jewish people. It seems that it was
the necessary condition to honour and celebrate them. The celebration of
a late Jewish people.
From now on, Jewish existence
was identified with the exclusive condition of victim and martyr, till
suffocation. The consequence was the depoliticization –sanctuarization
of the Jewish people in the European perspective: a dead people, a
people of victims but not a sovereign people, not an actor among the
actors of human history, that is what the state of Israel incarnates.
The Jewish communities became
the repository of the memory of the Shoa so that their concrete life
became an excess, a reprehensible abuse. The celebration of a dead
people opened the way to the deligitimicization of a living people.
The question which is asked to
Europe is to know what type of Israel will it recognize in the Jews. If
Zionism was born it was to find a solution for the Jewish people which
did not find a place in the modern political order after being excluded
for religious reasons under the Ancien Régime. In the Shoah, this people
was destructed. After WWII, all the Jewries in Arab-moslem states were
expelled or excluded so that there are no remnants of them in those
lands.Today when there is a state of Israel which incarnates the Jewish
collective destiny, will Europe recognize it as a living and legitimate
people or as a dead and celebrated people?
1 - See my book: The democratic Ideal and
the Shoah,The Unthought in Political Modernity
(translated by Gila Walker), SUNY Press, 2009.
http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61810
Shmuel Trigano is professor at Paris-Nanterre
University (Sociology of Politics and Religion), founder-director of the
Collège des Études Juives de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle (http://www.aiu.org/),
founder-director of two journals, Pardès(www.inpress.fr),
a European journal of Jewish Culture, and Controverses, a journal of
ideas (http://www.controverses.fr). He published 18 books (http://www.shmuel-trigano.fr/).
One of his book The democratic Ideal and the Shoah,The Unthought in
Political Modernity (translated by Gila Walker) was published in English,
SUNY Press, 2009 and is announced this fall in its Hebrew translation (Avner
Lahav) at Ben Gurion Uinversity Press .Philosophy of the Law, the
beginnings of politics in the Torah will be published soon by Shalem
Press, in English.
* A lecture at the International Conference «
European Jewry: A New Jewish Centre in the Making? »
(Berlin. May 10th – May 12th 2009), organized by the Moses Mendelssohn
Centre of European Jewish Studies in cooperation with Centrum Judaicum,
Klal Yisrael and Tel Aviv University .
blog_trigano_01112009.htm
