Izio Rosenman

Transmitting a Jewish identity

Notes on the transmission of a cultural Judaism — AJHL, December 2017.

This English version is an automated translation of Izio Rosenman’s French original; the French text is authoritative.

What is transmission? What is there to transmit? How does one transmit? And perhaps also: to whom? Then, I think, one may ask what it is we want to transmit, for to question the transmission of a collective identity is to ask: what to keep, what to reject, what to transform.

One may ask why the question of transmitting Judaism, or Jewish identity, arises with such force today. What is an identity, and what is Jewish identity?

Globalization, whose effect is to homogenize identities and blur differences, has a paradoxical consequence: it has heightened the fear of losing one’s identity. It has thus produced, in many groups, a retreat into themselves — a closing-off, this time a voluntary one. That might be one definition of communitarianism. And for Jews this effect is reinforced by the wave of antisemitism we have known for twenty or thirty years, which tends to position us essentially as victims, and therefore within a negative definition of Jewishness.

These phenomena of fear and identity-uncertainty are also expressed by a return of the religious, a consequence of the search for stable ground amid instability — even though, for a hundred years, religion has ceased to be the horizon of most Jews, and the unifying factor of world Jewry.

“To question Jewish identity is already to have lost it, but it is still to hold on to it — for otherwise one would avoid the questioning. Between this already and this still is drawn the line, stretched like a tightrope on which the Judaism of Western Jews ventures and risks itself.”
— Emmanuel Levinas

This sentence has been quoted many times, perhaps to show the identity-fragility of those who question themselves — which is also a way of belittling them. One can understand Levinas’s position, deeply attached to the Jewish religion and to traditional Jewish culture and learning, such as the Talmud. That position itself refers to traditional Jewish society.

Personally I think, on the contrary, that questioning is eminently part of the lived experience of Jewish identity, for I conceive of that identity essentially as a cultural identity — one which, unlike a revealed religious identity, is not fixed or given once and for all, but dynamic, changing, inscribed in history, in permanent elaboration, because it results from interactions with surrounding societies. One may give as examples Philo of Alexandria, born in 23 before the common era, or Maimonides (1135-1204). I therefore think that questioning is an essential part of Jewish identity and of the question of transmission.

We must nonetheless try to characterize what makes up cultural identity, and Jewish cultural identity in particular. Identity is a lived experience, an imaginary, a way of attaching oneself to a collective whole — whether one calls it a group, a tribe, a people or a nation — in time and in space; the sense of belonging to it. It has conscious as well as unconscious dimensions. A cultural identity has collective and individual aspects, founded at once on memory, on experience, on knowledge and on sensibility. It includes several historical and geographical strata. It entails fidelity and a sense of affiliation. It is therefore a sense of belonging, inscribed within a continuity.

The many dimensions of Jewish identity are well delineated by Albert Memmi — judaism: the religious dimension; Jewishness (judaïcité): the demographic and sociological aspect; Jewish being (judéité): the subjective lived experience.

Our history, the history of the Jews, is very long — more than three millennia; it unfolded across many geographical spaces: first in the ancient land of Canaan, then in ancient Egypt, then again in Canaan, in Palestine, then in Babylon and Persia, finally in the Near East, notably around the Mediterranean rim. After the destruction of the Second Temple came the definitive dispersion of the Jews throughout the world, and at last the return of a part to the ancient land with the creation of the State of Israel, after the destruction of a third of the Jewish people in the Shoah perpetrated by the Nazis.

Our cultural heritage, which serves as the foundation of our identity, is therefore very complex: at the same time as it bears the imprint of all these historical strata, with their religious, philosophical and artistic thought, it is also the result of the many contacts our people has had, over the course of history, with other peoples, cultures and civilizations — often vanished, moreover. Since in a few days it will be Hanukkah, I like to recall that the tune of Maoz Tsur Yeshuati, which we all sing as we light the candles, is a German Protestant church melody of the seventeenth century.

Eighty years ago, an American Jewish thinker, Mordecai Kaplan, wrote a book that also renders this complexity: Judaism as a Civilization. One may just as well choose, as I do, the term culture to characterize Judaism. What matters in this approach — as in Kaplan’s, though he keeps a religious dominant — is to observe that Judaism is a phenomenon far vaster than a religion. The experience of the Jews is far vaster and more diverse than a religious experience.

To feel oneself the heir of so vast and plural a culture is also to be confronted with a difficult question: how to make all these dimensions coexist within us? To feel oneself the descendant of Moses, of Hillel the Elder, the Sage of the Talmud, of Maimonides, founder of the modern Jewish tradition and of religious rationalism, of the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, of Moses Mendelssohn, founder of the Haskalah, of Vladimir Medem, theorist of the Bund, of Herzl and Borochov, those of Zionism, or of Martin Buber, founder of a religious Judaism grounded in dialogue and the place of the other — as well as the heirs of Levinas, who follows in Buber’s footsteps on certain points. All these figures, with their sometimes contradictory visions, yet all part of our heritage, as are the various languages of the Jewish people: Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Arabic. One thus measures the complexity, which only a diverse and plural historico-cultural perspective can help to hold.

Let us now see how this identity transformed and grew more complex over the course of history. For hundreds of years the Jews lived among themselves in a religious society closed in on itself, and within that framework transmission occurred, as it were, naturally: through the reproduction of the same, in absolute fidelity, through the inscription of the individual within a continuity, through religious teaching in the family or the heder. The content could vary but remained more fixed, since inscribed in a well-established tradition, through a system of religious rites and laws.

But after the political emancipation of the Jews and the appearance of the Enlightenment, and of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, everything changed. The Jews became secularized, and integrated into the surrounding societies, their culture and their political life. And now, in our secularized, then globalized and open societies, the modernity that characterizes them is a calling-into-question of tradition and of societies founded on bodies of wisdom and their transmission — whereas modern societies are founded on the individual’s autonomy of thought. Free decision returns to the individual at every moment.

For we live in a society in which identities are no longer imposed but chosen. Within this plural Jewish identity, one chooses, as it were à la carte, the portion of heritage that corresponds to oneself: some place themselves within the heritage of the Bund, others in a Zionist outlook with its many varieties, others again within one of the many religious obediences, and still others within no past Jewish political or cultural movement at all.

It must be said that the great past collective Jewish movements corresponded to populations gathered in large urban centres, as in pre-war Eastern Europe, or as in the Muslim countries before the great Jewish exoduses. These places could still serve as points of gathering, of reference, and so as centres of creation. Such great centres no longer exist, apart of course from Israel and the United States, which remain the great centres of Jewish reference and creation today, because of their large Jewish population. Likewise the social structure of the Jews has changed: the majority is no longer made up of proletarian masses, but rather of intellectuals, the professions, merchants, and so on.

In our Western societies, where most Jews now live, identities are plural. And as a result, lived identities are no longer necessarily permanent; they may be transitory; one may take hold of them as one may reject them, and leave the framework of communities — organized or not, virtual or real. They are no longer single but complex. Even those who have chosen a religious Jewish identity now have a choice among various affiliations (Hasidim, Orthodox, Masorti, Reform). Religion and the immense religious heritage are an eminent part of what we may call Jewish culture — all the more so since, until the Haskalah, it was religion that was the foundation of Jewish societies. But they now form only one part of it.

A relation to the ancient texts

At the heart of the Jewish religious tradition are the Bible and the Talmud. They are also an essential element of our cultural identity, even if they belong to the past. These texts are an element of our history that contains narratives, laws, rituals, myths — even our myths of origin. You see that this is a very vast whole, in which we can “do our shopping” at will, provided we acknowledge its complexity and its construction over the course of history.

The Talmud itself contains very sharp discussions, which shows that already in that ancient world — which lasted a thousand years after the beginning of the common era — truth was not given once and for all. One may even say that these discussions are at the foundation of what religious Judaism became over the centuries. It is perhaps these “Talmudic discussions” that gave the Jews such an interest in intellectual matters, for centuries and no doubt for two thousand years, as Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein have so well shown in their book The Chosen Few. How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492 (Albin Michel, 2016). This intellectual activity of discussion and study may, according to Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger, authors of Jews and Words (Gallimard, 2014), be regarded as the heart of Jewish identity — especially in a conception of Judaism as culture.

Prophets and ethics

An essential theme that runs through the ancient history of the Jews as it is narrated in the Bible, from the story of the Exodus, is the place held by the prophets and their ethical message of a demand for social justice — and this in the face of the power of the mighty, in particular the kings, in the kingdom of Judah as in the kingdom of Israel. This ethical demand is one of the most ancient, since it already appears in the Torah, and is tied to the Exodus: “You shall not oppress the stranger who dwells among you, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” We shall speak of this again with regard to the Seder of Passover.

This demand for justice was probably, at least unconsciously, at the source of the Jews’ engagement in the struggles for justice and equality in the twentieth century. These also drew their source and inspiration from our history as Jews, after the destruction of the Temple and the exile: a history of the oppressed and the driven-out, a minority. And this can help us build a social ethics of reaching toward the other, in the world in which we live. For every engagement is stronger if it takes root in collective memory. Collective memory is indeed the strongest foundation of cultural identity. And Simon Dubnow, one of the greatest Jewish historians, holds that cultural identity has a greater depth and a longer duration than political identity, which can change (Letters on Old and New Judaism; I draw on Simon Wuhl’s work on Dubnow’s thought).

How to transmit

I would now like to reflect on how to transmit this cultural Jewish identity. I will single out a few essential aspects on which this transmission may be founded: first, one’s own experience, memory, teaching, and rites or commemorations. Individual experience and memory concern those who lived through events crucial to the destiny of the Jewish people: for example the Shoah or the creation of the State of Israel. But these witnesses are now few. And the strong emotional charge of individual memory, transmitted within the family, tends to disappear with the direct witnesses. This memory now takes its place within a collective memory, which is transmitted differently: in books and teaching, in places of memory (memorials, traces in the Jewish towns of the present or the past, pilgrimages…), through other means, including rituals and commemorations. It is a vast questioning: how memory can serve to build our identity in grip with our present.

It is therefore necessary to ensure, through will, a transmission that brings continuity and creativity. Hence the need to reinvent other contents and other means — beyond knowledge, by leaning on the rites, whether religious or, for us, secular. This differs from what psychoanalysts envisage under the term “unconscious transmission of trauma” (see Jacques Hassoun’s fine book, The Smugglers of Memory).

Collective rites and rituals, religious and secular

We shall see, in the examples I will cite, that there is historically a continuity between the two aspects, the most ancient rites being of course of a religious type, at least originally.

As regards the Jewish religion, we may evoke the great religious festivals, which we too can celebrate, possibly breathing a new meaning into them. One may note that they historically have a double origin, purely seasonal or agrarian and, probably later, religious: Passover is the festival of spring, Shavuot that of the harvest of first fruits, and Sukkot — originally also called Hag ha-Asif, “the festival of the harvest” —, celebrated at the autumn harvest season, is also the festival of booths, whose purpose is to show the fragility of life, since one must eat in a hut that must not be protected from the rain. One sees that an ecological dimension can be attached to it. There is here a whole possible approach, notably toward children, to introduce them at once into our long history and into our care for the world. There is here the makings of giving the festivals a present-day meaning — but we shall see this in more detail for Passover.

As regards the rites, which ensure the emotional insertion of the individual into the collective while leaning on knowledge, it seems to me that there is a kind of continuity between the purely religious rites and the purely secular or cultural rites within Judaism. On the purely religious side, I may cite the collective prayers, for in traditional religious Judaism there is almost no place for isolated individual prayer: recall the minyan, the necessity of having ten persons — that is, a collective — for most prayers. At the other end, a purely secular, cultural ritual, such as the commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Yom HaShoah, the Vél d’Hiv round-up, or the celebration of Yom HaAtzmaut, the creation of the State of Israel, which ensure our fidelity and our insertion into the modern history of the Jewish people. There is also a mixed ritual, religious for some, historical for others: the festival of Hanukkah, which commemorates the heroic and victorious revolt of the Maccabees (168-160 before the common era) against the cultural and political oppression of the Seleucids, the Hellenistic sovereigns who succeeded Alexander the Great. A “miracle” was later inserted: the oil that remained for one day is said to have lasted seven.

A particular case, perhaps the most illuminating, is the celebration of the Seder of Passover, which commemorates the Exodus — the founding event of the Jewish people, half-mythical, half-real, in a sense its myth of origin, but also the founding event of the tradition of freedom and of the Jewish ethical demand, notably through the injunction that characterizes it, in all its varieties and for thousands of years: to respect the stranger. And there is nothing more important in the period we are living through, and will go on living through for decades no doubt: for the twenty-first century will surely be that of migrations, on account of the political conflicts and the economic and climatic crises to come. In the case of the Seder, we have an example of living memory, which joins the dimension of knowledge to emotional experience, for the tradition says: “Each person must regard himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt.” The Seder is also an occasion to question the present meaning of these matters — since it is about oppression, freedom, liberation, slavery: who are the slaves, who are the oppressors today?

Through these few examples, I have wished to mark both the diversity and the necessity of rituals for inserting the Jewish individual into the Jewish collective, into its history and its values. In the same way, the celebration of a secular Shabbat can allow a reflection on work in our world, and on the necessary suspension of work at a given moment, so as not to be wholly alienated.

I have approached transmission by choosing a few themes that seem to me major. One would of course have to add the important place held by the knowledge of Jewish literature and languages. All these languages are each an important vehicle of Jewish cultural identity, through texts, novels, poetry. Jewish writers — European, Israeli, American — all explore our recent or more distant past, or our immediate present, through places and characters. Let us add art, music — notably klezmer music —, bearers of memory and sensibility; klezmer, whose present revival we observe, seems to me a fine example of this transmission through fidelity and continual creation.

One sees that the landscape is vast, and that each of us can share only a tiny part of it. The choice is immense. There is no rule. All of this contributes to this complex and plural Jewish cultural identity. What matters, in my view, is the approach: to transmit is not to repeat, it is to choose and to innovate, so that the one who receives may make their own what they receive. And to conclude I will say that over the course of history Judaism has been plural, and has contained many currents, sects, oppositions; and this will go on for a long time yet. But the most important thing, at present, seems to me the necessity of reviving and affirming a new Jewish humanism that opens onto the world and that, in a sense, opens us up.

Bibliography

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