JERUSALEM POST No. 902
"Rather than flee what we are, we must bear and raise it toward what we want. "
Interview by David Reinharc
Paris: a young Jew is left on the sidewalk in a coma after an anti-Semitic attack. Titrate the media on alleged gang war. Meanwhile, beyond the fact that anti-Jewish, its statements and its manifestations, has metamorphosed into Nazi racialism racism leftist or progressive Muslim.
But beyond this disturbing finding, and if the Jewish question was the hidden face of Western modernity? For the Jews, always, there were subject to persistent denial and congenital. Against this
modernity that wants to normalize the Jews by stripping them of their inner being is a real departure from Egypt who would see the resurrection of a bruised Jewishness that we invite the philosopher Shmuel Trigano.
By giving us some tools here to think about Jewishness, laboratory of the modern age, and dark time.
Being Jewish
Reinharc-David: Is there a clear definition of the word "Jew"?
-Shmuel Trigano: There is, in Judaism, a double entry: firstly, it is a religion, a set of concepts, doctrines, ideas, behaviors that constitute it; of Secondly, it is a people. Judaism is a revealed religion of a people.
Religion and people do not always coincide so that there is a constant game between the two.
Hence a disorder ambivalent towards this phenomenon.
can evoke moreover, Jewishness. It means everything about the Jews, those who identify themselves as Jews and are, but you can also hear it as a metaphysical figure. Jewishness would refer to an archetype, an absolute, Judaism, bigger than Judaism sociological institutionalized.
- David Reinharc: There is a signifier "Jew" who does not need the Jews?
-Shmuel Trigano: The meaning of the West and Islam, as any dominant ideology (Communism, Nazism ...).
- David Reinharc: Lacan said that the signifier is the murder of the thing, so we can understand the meaning itself is sufficient to create anti-Semitism ...
-Shmuel Trigano: That is precisely what happened with the ideological operation that has delivered the apostle Paul, who is to prescribe a meaning that Israel is free of the Jews in favor of concrete an abstract Israel.
is the structural model of the West, and less aware of Islam. The second Intifada was extraordinarily revived.
- David Reinharc: You distinguish between Judaism and Jewishness, so we could arrive at this paradox: one can be Jewish and secular or atheist, and do not recognize themselves in the rabbinic law ...
-Shmuel Trigano: The Jewish system is dynamique.Il can happen a dissociation between its two components and we do recommend that the people and not Judaism.
But can we speak of Jewish secularism? I am perplexed. There would have been a "theocracy" or, in Judaism, there is no priestly mediation. The revelation about the Sinai serves a community without another mediator and instrumental, what Moses. Judaism has its roots in a "secular religion" because it is a people and not a church.
However, the fact is, there is a Jewish secularism is not religious, even anti-religious ...
- David Reinharc: Judaism is the only religion of the three monotheistic religions where one can assert Jewish atheist.
-Shmuel Trigano: In its component people yes, but Judaism can in no way be an atheist. The only outstanding issue is what is meant by the term "God". Which god are you an atheist? Maybe this is god is he not the God of Israel?
This shows that Judaism is the subject of an issue within the Jewish people.
There is no adequate spontaneous, automatic between Judaism and the Jewish people.
This is not true only among Jews but also of Judaism: the biblical text is a text critical towards the people of Israel. This dynamic relationship is perhaps what makes Jewishness.
- David Reinharc: This critical work is done when there?
-Shmuel Trigano: That the issue of Jewish history. But his achievement, thought so messianic, is postponed, delayed.
- David Reinharc: Jew and an atheist, in all cases, it is not contradictory?
-Shmuel Trigano: This alternative assumes that it refers to models. Yet there is no "model" of God which can not be the subject of a representation. The report is the divine relation to a void or an absence. And it rubbed off on the Jewish condition. The Jewish condition as an identity is a product of modernity. All the Jewish city is organized around this vacuum.
- David Reinharc: Around the unpronounceable name ...
-Shmuel Trigano: Yes, but it is written, unpronounceable, unspeakable not. This is not an empty nothingness. It displays a text: the Torah.
The report singles out the divine Jewish religion.
- David Reinharc: can obey the law regardless of belief ...
-Shmuel Trigano: It follows on the basis of a covenant between God and unrepresentable a swarm of human beings, the people of Israel.
The dimension of the Alliance and founder of consent is therefore in terms of obedience.
terms of belief, it does not believe in God, but to ensure that the conduct that was God's presence makes it credible that others do not see. The Abrahamic
behavior lends credence to the entourage that God before whom he stands but no one sees.
In Christianity or Islam, you have word that someone says inspired. Moses is a small reporter, this is not an intermediary, or a mediator in the direction of Jesus or Mohammed.
What place for Jews in history?
- Shmuel Trigano : There is a difficulty in representing the history of the Jews, exploded on several continents, through a history that goes from Antiquity to the present. If a Hebrew
returned today to ask his way to Israel, we understand, he would respond. He would find the path of the capital, where the same God would be worshiped. It is unique in the history of civilization.
This object which is so historical, it's hard to get it into the context of history textbooks. The history books that we know are manuals built around the idea of nation, the survival of a nation from its origins to today.
The Jewish people is larger than the Israeli nation (which is not its opposite).
in Israel in school textbooks secular state, the Jewish people is absent.
They do not start with the history of biblical times. Students hear about the Jews from the empire of Alexander the Great.
The history of the diaspora remains as problematic and marginal: it is a story called "universal" that is taught, in fact Western history.
Same problem with Zionism: its history is supposed to erase it from the diaspora. A few years ago, we jumped in with both feet over twenty centuries of history in the diaspora, to favor a national history and territory. Today is the history of Zionism, which tends to be erased in the name of the post-modern pluralism. A denial of the Jewish people is seriously at work among the Jewish elite. It is a suicidal symptom.
I tried to build in several collective works of thousands of pages, a conceptual structure that allows to gather the extraordinary diversity of this story but in which there are constants powerful, from Morocco to Poland, from Persia to England.
- David Reinharc: In France, what place for the Jewish people?
-Shmuel Trigano: The Book of History is the basis of the Third Republic, a regime that wanted a unification of the nation around a common narrative and around the same timeline, a history linear.
In this linear history, stories minority marginal or did not belong because they undermined the unity of the national discourse.
Jews were emancipated only as anonymous individuals, either as Jews or as a community, so that their story was supposed to end.
The problem is that Jews have a history, a culture, they are a community: it is a fact of history.
This occultation caused disasters whose apotheosis was the Holocaust, where Jews were exterminated en masse, as a people, when they were supposed to be individual citizens.
Thereupon, become connected, the establishment of the State of Israel the return of a positive collective Jewish destiny.
- David Reinharc: Are you opposed to the "national narrative"?
-Shmuel Trigano: Certainly not because a democratic political community is impossible outside a national framework. Any political community needs a unifying narrative. By this account
cons must also make room for the stories included minority in the nation. This listing is provided.
Due to a massive Muslim immigration, the weakening of the national narrative would endanger Jewish identity in France as it was thought after the Second World War.
must reregister the History of the Jews of France in the history of France for not they come out of nowhere when we approach the Holocaust, so that the contemporary Jewish condition is not only victimhood.
By universalizing the Holocaust at Auschwitz it was a Passion Christ and it accused the Jews to the corner!
In the eyes of a section of public opinion, the myth of the Nakba is the current of the Passion.
Jews of France: the abandonment
- David Reinharc: Explaining the impact of the Second Intifada on Jews in France?
-Shmuel Trigano: The Jews felt that the state had abandoned them in 2001-2002, when a blackout hit the 450 anti-Semitic attacks both from the government and the media but also friends Jewish institutions.
We felt that our citizenship was in question on behalf of the public peace.
We felt that the Republic does not defend its identity, its culture. It was an opportunity to discover in the violence in this situation the universality of the Republic shall also, and paradoxically a protective effect for Jews.
I realized during these years of intifada what could be the fate of Jews during the war who called for help without being heard and, worse, by being accused of being the instigators of violence ...
- David Reinharc: At the expense of "minorities" ...?
-Shmuel Trigano: The Jewish community after the Second World War has never been thought of as a minority. It was a community identity, a way to restore the citizenship of which the Jews had been excluded by Vichy.
But the landscape has changed and what was the object of a choice, the community tends to become a ghetto. What was a free choice becomes a residency.
This new situation radically changes the Jewish condition. We must recognize that multiculturalism has created a new anti-Semitism
- David Reinharc: Who are the Jews who remain frequent?
- Shmuel Trigano: During those years, Jews have been arrested by French society: they were asked to respond to the policy of the State of Israel. The Jew who does not deny one way or another is not accepted.
I do not think this has caused a downturn community. Conversely, many Jews have departed from the community, become too heavy to carry.
- David Reinharc: A paradoxical double movement took place: one that aims to move away from those who ask us to make because of the policy of the State of Israel and in the same time, second movement, distance from a community in which we do not feel safe.
Jews are there in a sort of in-between?
-Shmuel Trigano: That's why, yes, the error is large.
The future of French Judaism as an identity and symbolic morality is at stake today.
- David Reinharc: Talk about a failure of democratic thought ...
-Shmuel Trigano: It is in democratic thought a failure that not only Jews but instead of collective identity, national democracy. The bond of citizenship with nationality has not been thought in the mind of human rights.
The image of the Jew in a multicultural era
- David Reinharc: At the triumph of the differences, the Jews are they more acceptable?
-Shmuel Trigano: That is the environment that fosters the differences that the new anti-Semitism grew. This medium
there is intolerant of Jewish difference as if the difference was larger than Jewish "differences."
Even when Jews are flowing in the folk model differences, minority identities, there is something in them that others see but they do not necessarily rest and assimilate. It happens with multiculturalism the same thing as nationalism (now the nation, the Jewish people remains disputed). There is probably a relationship here with transcendence that sticks to the Jewish condition.
- David Reinharc: Can we say that in the best possible world, racism, homophobia, etc.., Disappear but not the hatred of Jews?
-Shmuel Trigano: It had been thought previously that the nation state in its centralism, was in principle opposed to a hospitality to Jewish identity.
What we discover is that the opposite of the nation-state, ie fragmentation, multiple identities is also hostile to the Jewish condition. For
minority, the Jews appear as the nation-state par excellence unbearable, the Jewish community as exclusive and rejecting others.
is a distorted vision of transcendence that eludes the differentiation within the variety.
Somehow, this is true for Israel, Zionism has been the most rigorously for the Jews become like any other. And the refusal was warming.
- David Reinharc: Faced with this refusal, how do you see the reaction of the Jewish people, a colossus with feet of clay?
-Shmuel Trigano: The Jews are insane. They do not live their being, they do not feel authorized to be spontaneously what they are to reach out to others and meet others.
feet of clay, it is Jews who are undermining themselves. Rather than flee what we are, as we have for two centuries, we must bear and raise it toward what we want. It should be up in the Jewish belief and hope as hard as diamond!
http://www.shmuel-trigano.fr/
Guest: David Mascré doctor in mathematics, philosophy, history of science lecturer at the University of Paris V and EDHEC.
the theme: Crisis of the French University: the system Israel can be a model? )
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