בס"ד
The identity of a people
For Manitou, Rav Yehuda Leon Ashkenazi, zatsal
Interview by Victor Malka and published in Today be Jewish, Editions du Cerf, 1984, pp.
65-75
Victor Malka: You're a Jew, a mystic. Do you recognize yourself in this name?
Manitou: The term has different mystical meanings, and I do not know that you give. This is maybe I was one of the first in France after the war to study midrash - and if not to teach, inspire me at least - and the texts of Kabbalah and to those who are not really familiar with this type of study, the term mystical is required first.
In contemporary civilization, after the great crisis of the Christian tradition in the West, and since we are talking about European languages and it permeates the formulations of Judaism in the West, there secondarisation of thought has made. It is a shame really to appear as a believer. Perhaps what we found then, in the style of my teaching, this identification. And that is what we would be indicated by the term mystic.
My own study of what are the mystics in the great cultural traditions lead me rather to identify, in a sense, experience mystical experience pagan. The mystic is someone who identifies himself more or less, to the deity itself. And I am a stranger to this kind of experience.
There is no Jewish mysticism?
I do not think so. Some Jewish mystics whose experience is internalized with great modesty at the individual level. This experience is subjective when it is allowed by tradition, but if it stands as orthodoxy, it could become a heresy.
Jewish tradition is defined as loyalty to what was prophetic revelation . But it happened so important a historical event that has disappeared from memory: the decision of the prophecy. It does not lend insufficient attention to the significance of this event. This happened long ago, and it was announced by the Hebrew prophets themselves, along with the exile of Israel and the destruction of the Temple. One can, schematically to excess, indicate three types of cultural responses in humanity to stop the prophecy. Appeared in the West philosophy. In the East, mysticism. In Israel - it is the Jewish tradition itself - there was a religious reaction in the classical sense of fidelity to what was the event of the prophecy. This event was stopped at the collective level, as experience revealed. He continues in another form at the individual level: this is what we call the inspiration of the Ruach Haqodesh . But the fact that the prophetic and mystical natures are different. In the act of prophecy - and therefore, in fidelity to the memory - there is otherness between God who speaks and the believer who listens to his speech. In mystical experience, there is confusion substances.
To hear you there would be no Jewish mystical prophet?
culture is a mistake simply to call the prophets of Israel mystics. I'm not saying we did not understand the mystical experience, but it will not fit our purpose is to know and understand what the word revealed by the creator of the world requires of His creature.
Until the seventies, you were a guru of French Judaism. From everywhere, people came to consult you. The diaspora was something important to you. Then one day you decided to relocate to Israel. Do you consider Today we can not be totally Jewish in Jerusalem?
Anyway that being Israeli. It is primarily a question of identification. Was I mentor? I do not know what that means. I was primarily an educator. The way of thinking, it's a personal experience: do not teach somebody to think. He transmits content.
The path you mention lasted some time. I realize that with the emergence of Israeli society was an important event happened in the history of our people. There are two thousand years, the Hebrew nation had been destroyed by the Roman civilization. The Jewish people, heir to the Hebrews, was born of this destruction, but with different dimensions of identity. The Hebrew nation, as the Bishop's Bible - ID of the Hebrew - is defined by a simple formula: a Hebrew is a Hebrew, perceived as such, accepting themselves as such, with its worldview ( today we would say his philosophy), his own religion, language and culture. It is a simple identity, if not live, at least to define, because it is not a problem; It was as Assyrian Hebrew and Assyrian was a Gaul, Gallic way of life ... This man had a considerable impact in the history of mankind in general. Just think, among other things for the West Christianity or Islam, for the East, who are both in their rivalry with Judaism, the impact of Hebrew history. It is at the personality and way of being human - to use the vocabulary of personalist - the Hebrew is defined.
When the Hebrew nation was destroyed, therefore emerged Jewish identity. The Jews are in fact, historically, the Judeans of the dispersion. The word means the last of the Hebrews, the members of the second kingdom of Judah. Jewish identity is a mixed identity. There has never been a "Jewish": there were only the Judeo-someone else. It is an identity composed composite, with several dimensions.
And such was our case during the last generation of exile: I am, for example, always known as a Jew born Algeria, with this aspect of Algerian identity that does not leave me, culture and French citizenship and, secondly, Hebrew by heredity, by nostalgia, by fidelity to the inner life, by culture and religion as well.
Thus the Jew has always defined it in his own fidelity in two dimensions always anachronistic: one dimension between Hebrew past, nostalgia absolute, in the hope of restoring the Hebrew and, secondly, dimension linking the future.
Now two thousand years is a long time. This was a story heroic, extremely rich. Through these two thousand years of history, Jews have become accustomed to a situation and status that were necessary for survival, but preliminary. This explains why many Jews were more than puzzled when the phenomenon of Zionism in its outcome was restored in the beginning of a story that is yet to be done, the identity of the Hebrew nation.
is why you talk about réhébraïsation?
two thousand years ago, Hebrew had become a Jew. Today, the Jew becomes Jewish, and that that the Israeli identity. It is an irreversible phenomenon at the collective level, and that when a Jew becomes aware of this irreversibility that is Israel.
Although at the individual level, and for the greatest number of Jewish people, a phenomenon that continues to exist for puzzlement. We are among many Israelis to accept as perfectly legitimate that the pace of adjustment of identity at the individual level is not the same as that of the community.
This means, in fact, that you are Hebrew and one who asks you a Jew?
We are both of Jewish origin. For me, this origin finds its legitimacy in the hebraization. On the other hand, the Jewish diaspora is the member of the same people but in history class and who is still feeling its way. In my opinion, there can be - and I'm simplifying - only two possibilities: either the rehébraïsation, and I take this term not only in the linguistic sense, although it is important, but in the sense of identity - or an adventure that we do not see very well where it may lead but we are very concerned: that of a cosmopolitan Jewish identity that would continue the story of the old diaspora.
There would be two problems: the Jew and that of the Hebrew?
For two thousand years the Jew in him that brought hope to regain the Hebrew. Today, history has made this hope in the enormous difficulties that we know and with an almost universal inquiry. And that's the indication of the importance of the event.
other hand, there is a problem which Jewish identity. The Jew can now if he wishes to regularize its identity and yet it does not. So there are obstacles in the range of interest and perplexity. ... The process that is underway is fraught with potentialities.
Yes, but in Israel too, there are Jews whose relationship with Judaism is most tenuous?
Being Jewish in Israel is confused still be free .... Is to be in the house. Being Jewish in the Diaspora perplexing is the question central to its identity.
Until 1948, the diaspora was that of the second kingdom Judah. Suddenly, the third Jewish state - Israel - appears. And there is a perpetuation of the old diaspora. What worries us, it is not so much the Jews as individuals, but organizations that are planning on them a sham ideology.
When you look at the life of Jewish communities in the Diaspora today - whether at the level of individuals or organizations that - what is striking is the silly side of this life, and the fact that no more now that Jews perplexed.
The average Israeli is more concerned about the massiveness events as matters of ideology or formal definitions. Events such as to make obsolete and fictitious ideological analysis.
This perplexity which you speak was positive before the creation of the State of Israel, but the magnitude of events that develops around this is creating for us the essential argument. The almost universal coalition against Israel is significant. It therefore takes precedence over ideological or philosophical research to know if it continues to exist a Jewish legitimacy outside the Israeli adventure.
Can one be Jewish without faith, without dogma, without God?
Insofar as it is part of the collective identity, one is aware that, whatever the individual option of atheism or taken from Jews, it is part of a whole which, it is the one of the contractors of the covenant between God and Israel in biblical terms.
The difference must be made between individual choice and collective option. I do not know if we can take stock of what separates the Israelis from the Jewish Diaspora to the problems we're talking about. There is one point which seems to me significant: the Jewish diaspora has not yet realized that the collective dimension of his people was realized. It was an object of hope, and we were talking about Jewish people, but we lived the life of fragmented communities. This collective dimension, the Israeli has done.
In our century, when the prophecy does not enlighten consciences, it is perhaps not important that the Jews do not believe in God. The key is he knows that God believes in him.
What we know, deep down, the God who revealed himself to Israel is the fact that history Israel has a special meaning .... You have to trust this people, that living the fulfillment of the promises that the prophets have made in the name of God is an option to trust in God even if we do not use the theological vocabulary.
In the last centuries of the history of Jews in the diaspora, there is a big misunderstanding that has crept into the consciences: it is a mistake to define Judaism as a religion first. Jewish identity is defined, first, like that of a people. This people, like religion, the Jewish religion.
But there is conflict - And more acute - between religious and secular in Israel?
Projecting categories opposition between church and state, clericalism, of theocracy on the reality Hebrew is illegitimate, illegitimate as also that of the project on an Islamic society.
We are now at the stage where two kinds of Jews have decided to revert Hebrew: those who have decided to no longer be Jews and those who have decided to really be able to. It is a phenomenon whose origin dates back to Emancipation. In Western Europe where there were few Jews (France, Britain, Germany, Italy, for example), Emancipation was a plausible solution. But in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe - where Jewish populations were really important - this was hardly feasible solution. In those countries where political Zionism was born, we did not let Jews assimilate, that is to say, is taken from Jews.
A solution is apparent: it was to restore the Jewish nation.
You confirm that Zionism has, in one way or another, taken from Jews Judaism?
Undeniably. Maybe it was the price to pay to make this change? There is a reason that illuminates the struggle between religious and secular in Israel. Is the fact that the founders of political Zionism were alerted by the risk of extinction of the Jewish people in European civilization. They found as an obstacle to their project, the traditional synagogue. The symbiosis of Jews with the outside world was so strong, it was so ingrained in society, it was believed that the persecution which lay ahead were one episode among many, and they could pass through without too much difficulty.
So the founders of political Zionism, in their majority, had to oppose the traditional synagogue. In other words, to save the Jews, they had to destroy communities. The reaction of the rabbis was inevitable: they were opposed to Zionism they saw as a company taken from Jews.
It looks like a tragedy: the rabbis accused the Zionists to lose the soul of the Jewish and Zionist rabbis accused of losing their bodies. He had to destroy to save Judaism Jews. Of this issue, we are still paying for today.
should consider this: there is a kind of mutual hatred that underlies the relationship between religious and nonreligious. As leaders of the two currents will stem not and do not discover what they all have in common and that is much greater than what divides them - we live this Kulturkampf.
This dialogue, you think it possible?
He begins to take place in Israeli society since the Yom Kippur War in 1973. We realized that both sides had a common condition, in the existentialist sense of the word. It was at this time born the phrase "Israel as a Jewish state." Non-religious Israelis began to ponder the meaning of Jewish history and religion have become aware of their common destiny with those who have shaped the state.
you think, then, Judaism is not defined primarily by religion. For what type of Judaism you Involved?
There is a minimal definition that can be unanimous: we must attend to the history of that people, regardless of how each fits into it. And there may sometimes have experiences on the negative mode.
You mean being against, is a way to be for?
When is cons is that we are concerned. That said, there are levels of authenticity. There are currents of Jewish life that carry more or less, the authenticity of the community. I substitute for my part, after religious denomination, that of the Torah which clearly implies that the Jewish religion can not be qu'hébraïque. It seems to me that there were three dimensions that define our identity, which until the time of Emancipation unify. It was simultaneously the Jewish relationship to the Land of Israel, the Torah of Israel and people of Israel.
With Emancipation, these three dimensions were disjointed and fragmented. There are still many Jews who participate in three dimensions at once.
Since Emancipation, there are three types of identified Jews in history. Those who define themselves only through participation in the history of the people who prefer the religion (and these have replaced the identity of religious confession the relationship of the Torah), and finally those who assert Jews only by their relationship to the Earth, that is to say the so-called non-religious Zionists.
These three ways of being Jewish all three are legitimate. When deepen their differences, they tend to caricature and to fight.
Our people are subjected to a pressure of today's almost universal story that compels him to resist the risk of extinction.
We had to undergo three bouts, and each of these battles, Jews took advantage of the enemies of their people. First, we tried cut us off from the Torah. We survived and it's already exceptional because we came back after two thousand in Israel with the Torah under his arm. Then they tried to destroy the people, pure and simple. We're in this fight, also won. Today, we want to cut us off from our land.
There is an order of emergency, and you may find it paradoxical that a rabbi tell you that the order of urgency these days, it is not the Torah but the identity of the people and the land, behind which the Torah can be genuine.
But there are Jews today in diaspora, who have no connection either with the Torah, nor the land nor the people of Israel.
This is not new in our history. These Jews highlight the problem of special responsibility worn by rabbis. They too stand in positions that seem to us, seen by Israel, too archaic. If educators were telling the truth to the Jews of the diaspora by explaining that the story is initially that of a nation - and not an appendage of cultural or religious - Jewish consciousness could regain its authenticity.
You not shocked by the fact that most of those who are speaking today on behalf of Judaism in the Diaspora are men detached from any Jewish culture?
Judaism is not an ideology. This is not the cosmopolitan, widespread phenomenon today. There are two thousand years, Christianity has been defined as a religion after the Jewish people, but cut off from the nation of Israel.
I wonder how this cosmopolitan ideology of the diaspora does not present a parallel direction. That is to say identity of Jewish origin but cut the nation Jewish.
What is wrong cosmopolitanism?
It is foreign to Judaism, in that it is defined as not part of any nation. Judaism, it is a nation among the other but with a universal vocation.
As a Sephardic Jew, you are claiming any specificity in the panorama of Jewish today?
Absolutely. I think the bifurcation caused by the Exile did exist two types of Jews. The identity of the Ashkenazi Jew has formulated and expressed in the world of Christian civilization. Sephardic Jew was that of conducted in the Islamic world.
There is a pattern with important biblical Israel, with Ishmael, Isaac's. In Esau is Jacob.
The problem with respect to the non-Jew is different, therefore, as is a Sephardi or Ashkenazi. We were arrested in countries Sephardic, the Muslim who, vis-à-vis Israel conflict on the earth and not heaven. In Ashkenazi countries, we were challenged by the Christian. But the conflict - seriously - of Christianity with Judaism on the sky. Thus the civilization
Christian-they get used to grant citizenship to their Jewish policy, but did they place the Jews in the paradise of the elect? Conversely, the Muslim knows that the sky belongs to the people of Abraham, but he has no place on earth. These two identities have a very long history and rich. They exist and we can not cancel by simple decree. However, they still
identities of exile. As an Israeli who came from the diaspora, I stay all my life, one hundred percent, Sephardic. But I know my children will recognize as an "origin" Sephardic. You
sometimes he feared for the future of Diaspora Jews, faced with the vitality of assimilation, for name changes and sometimes conversions?
For a traditional Jew, the identity of a Jew, whatever his way of connecting to Judaism, is a precious commodity. We are a nation of survivors. And whenever we think of these waves of assimilation, we remember with sadness and concern.
It seems to me that the obstacle to that taken from Jews no longer passes today, overall, by the transmission of the so-called "Jewish values". If only because it is sometimes difficult in a particular language, to distinguish between the message of Christianity and Judaism. Many of our values are now fallen into the public domain. The obstacle to such treatment can not be that the teaching of Hebrew as a language. Away from the Hebrew, assimilation is less strong.
We are however far more worried about the risks posed by the revival of antisemitism. Whenever the cultural symbiosis of Judaism with the local civilization has succeeded, disasters have befallen the Jewish people. This was the case of Spain and Germany .... But today, the Judeo-Christian cultural symbiosis is now succeeding in America and also in Europe, especially France. What will be the outcome?
The identity of a people
For Manitou, Rav Yehuda Leon Ashkenazi, zatsal
Interview by Victor Malka and published in Today be Jewish, Editions du Cerf, 1984, pp.
65-75
Victor Malka: You're a Jew, a mystic. Do you recognize yourself in this name?
Manitou: The term has different mystical meanings, and I do not know that you give. This is maybe I was one of the first in France after the war to study midrash - and if not to teach, inspire me at least - and the texts of Kabbalah and to those who are not really familiar with this type of study, the term mystical is required first.
In contemporary civilization, after the great crisis of the Christian tradition in the West, and since we are talking about European languages and it permeates the formulations of Judaism in the West, there secondarisation of thought has made. It is a shame really to appear as a believer. Perhaps what we found then, in the style of my teaching, this identification. And that is what we would be indicated by the term mystic.
My own study of what are the mystics in the great cultural traditions lead me rather to identify, in a sense, experience mystical experience pagan. The mystic is someone who identifies himself more or less, to the deity itself. And I am a stranger to this kind of experience.
There is no Jewish mysticism?
I do not think so. Some Jewish mystics whose experience is internalized with great modesty at the individual level. This experience is subjective when it is allowed by tradition, but if it stands as orthodoxy, it could become a heresy.
Jewish tradition is defined as loyalty to what was prophetic revelation . But it happened so important a historical event that has disappeared from memory: the decision of the prophecy. It does not lend insufficient attention to the significance of this event. This happened long ago, and it was announced by the Hebrew prophets themselves, along with the exile of Israel and the destruction of the Temple. One can, schematically to excess, indicate three types of cultural responses in humanity to stop the prophecy. Appeared in the West philosophy. In the East, mysticism. In Israel - it is the Jewish tradition itself - there was a religious reaction in the classical sense of fidelity to what was the event of the prophecy. This event was stopped at the collective level, as experience revealed. He continues in another form at the individual level: this is what we call the inspiration of the Ruach Haqodesh . But the fact that the prophetic and mystical natures are different. In the act of prophecy - and therefore, in fidelity to the memory - there is otherness between God who speaks and the believer who listens to his speech. In mystical experience, there is confusion substances.
To hear you there would be no Jewish mystical prophet?
culture is a mistake simply to call the prophets of Israel mystics. I'm not saying we did not understand the mystical experience, but it will not fit our purpose is to know and understand what the word revealed by the creator of the world requires of His creature.
Until the seventies, you were a guru of French Judaism. From everywhere, people came to consult you. The diaspora was something important to you. Then one day you decided to relocate to Israel. Do you consider Today we can not be totally Jewish in Jerusalem?
Anyway that being Israeli. It is primarily a question of identification. Was I mentor? I do not know what that means. I was primarily an educator. The way of thinking, it's a personal experience: do not teach somebody to think. He transmits content.
The path you mention lasted some time. I realize that with the emergence of Israeli society was an important event happened in the history of our people. There are two thousand years, the Hebrew nation had been destroyed by the Roman civilization. The Jewish people, heir to the Hebrews, was born of this destruction, but with different dimensions of identity. The Hebrew nation, as the Bishop's Bible - ID of the Hebrew - is defined by a simple formula: a Hebrew is a Hebrew, perceived as such, accepting themselves as such, with its worldview ( today we would say his philosophy), his own religion, language and culture. It is a simple identity, if not live, at least to define, because it is not a problem; It was as Assyrian Hebrew and Assyrian was a Gaul, Gallic way of life ... This man had a considerable impact in the history of mankind in general. Just think, among other things for the West Christianity or Islam, for the East, who are both in their rivalry with Judaism, the impact of Hebrew history. It is at the personality and way of being human - to use the vocabulary of personalist - the Hebrew is defined.
When the Hebrew nation was destroyed, therefore emerged Jewish identity. The Jews are in fact, historically, the Judeans of the dispersion. The word means the last of the Hebrews, the members of the second kingdom of Judah. Jewish identity is a mixed identity. There has never been a "Jewish": there were only the Judeo-someone else. It is an identity composed composite, with several dimensions.
And such was our case during the last generation of exile: I am, for example, always known as a Jew born Algeria, with this aspect of Algerian identity that does not leave me, culture and French citizenship and, secondly, Hebrew by heredity, by nostalgia, by fidelity to the inner life, by culture and religion as well.
Thus the Jew has always defined it in his own fidelity in two dimensions always anachronistic: one dimension between Hebrew past, nostalgia absolute, in the hope of restoring the Hebrew and, secondly, dimension linking the future.
Now two thousand years is a long time. This was a story heroic, extremely rich. Through these two thousand years of history, Jews have become accustomed to a situation and status that were necessary for survival, but preliminary. This explains why many Jews were more than puzzled when the phenomenon of Zionism in its outcome was restored in the beginning of a story that is yet to be done, the identity of the Hebrew nation.
is why you talk about réhébraïsation?
two thousand years ago, Hebrew had become a Jew. Today, the Jew becomes Jewish, and that that the Israeli identity. It is an irreversible phenomenon at the collective level, and that when a Jew becomes aware of this irreversibility that is Israel.
Although at the individual level, and for the greatest number of Jewish people, a phenomenon that continues to exist for puzzlement. We are among many Israelis to accept as perfectly legitimate that the pace of adjustment of identity at the individual level is not the same as that of the community.
This means, in fact, that you are Hebrew and one who asks you a Jew?
We are both of Jewish origin. For me, this origin finds its legitimacy in the hebraization. On the other hand, the Jewish diaspora is the member of the same people but in history class and who is still feeling its way. In my opinion, there can be - and I'm simplifying - only two possibilities: either the rehébraïsation, and I take this term not only in the linguistic sense, although it is important, but in the sense of identity - or an adventure that we do not see very well where it may lead but we are very concerned: that of a cosmopolitan Jewish identity that would continue the story of the old diaspora.
There would be two problems: the Jew and that of the Hebrew?
For two thousand years the Jew in him that brought hope to regain the Hebrew. Today, history has made this hope in the enormous difficulties that we know and with an almost universal inquiry. And that's the indication of the importance of the event.
other hand, there is a problem which Jewish identity. The Jew can now if he wishes to regularize its identity and yet it does not. So there are obstacles in the range of interest and perplexity. ... The process that is underway is fraught with potentialities.
Yes, but in Israel too, there are Jews whose relationship with Judaism is most tenuous?
Being Jewish in Israel is confused still be free .... Is to be in the house. Being Jewish in the Diaspora perplexing is the question central to its identity.
Until 1948, the diaspora was that of the second kingdom Judah. Suddenly, the third Jewish state - Israel - appears. And there is a perpetuation of the old diaspora. What worries us, it is not so much the Jews as individuals, but organizations that are planning on them a sham ideology.
When you look at the life of Jewish communities in the Diaspora today - whether at the level of individuals or organizations that - what is striking is the silly side of this life, and the fact that no more now that Jews perplexed.
The average Israeli is more concerned about the massiveness events as matters of ideology or formal definitions. Events such as to make obsolete and fictitious ideological analysis.
This perplexity which you speak was positive before the creation of the State of Israel, but the magnitude of events that develops around this is creating for us the essential argument. The almost universal coalition against Israel is significant. It therefore takes precedence over ideological or philosophical research to know if it continues to exist a Jewish legitimacy outside the Israeli adventure.
Can one be Jewish without faith, without dogma, without God?
Insofar as it is part of the collective identity, one is aware that, whatever the individual option of atheism or taken from Jews, it is part of a whole which, it is the one of the contractors of the covenant between God and Israel in biblical terms.
The difference must be made between individual choice and collective option. I do not know if we can take stock of what separates the Israelis from the Jewish Diaspora to the problems we're talking about. There is one point which seems to me significant: the Jewish diaspora has not yet realized that the collective dimension of his people was realized. It was an object of hope, and we were talking about Jewish people, but we lived the life of fragmented communities. This collective dimension, the Israeli has done.
In our century, when the prophecy does not enlighten consciences, it is perhaps not important that the Jews do not believe in God. The key is he knows that God believes in him.
What we know, deep down, the God who revealed himself to Israel is the fact that history Israel has a special meaning .... You have to trust this people, that living the fulfillment of the promises that the prophets have made in the name of God is an option to trust in God even if we do not use the theological vocabulary.
In the last centuries of the history of Jews in the diaspora, there is a big misunderstanding that has crept into the consciences: it is a mistake to define Judaism as a religion first. Jewish identity is defined, first, like that of a people. This people, like religion, the Jewish religion.
But there is conflict - And more acute - between religious and secular in Israel?
Projecting categories opposition between church and state, clericalism, of theocracy on the reality Hebrew is illegitimate, illegitimate as also that of the project on an Islamic society.
We are now at the stage where two kinds of Jews have decided to revert Hebrew: those who have decided to no longer be Jews and those who have decided to really be able to. It is a phenomenon whose origin dates back to Emancipation. In Western Europe where there were few Jews (France, Britain, Germany, Italy, for example), Emancipation was a plausible solution. But in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe - where Jewish populations were really important - this was hardly feasible solution. In those countries where political Zionism was born, we did not let Jews assimilate, that is to say, is taken from Jews.
A solution is apparent: it was to restore the Jewish nation.
You confirm that Zionism has, in one way or another, taken from Jews Judaism?
Undeniably. Maybe it was the price to pay to make this change? There is a reason that illuminates the struggle between religious and secular in Israel. Is the fact that the founders of political Zionism were alerted by the risk of extinction of the Jewish people in European civilization. They found as an obstacle to their project, the traditional synagogue. The symbiosis of Jews with the outside world was so strong, it was so ingrained in society, it was believed that the persecution which lay ahead were one episode among many, and they could pass through without too much difficulty.
So the founders of political Zionism, in their majority, had to oppose the traditional synagogue. In other words, to save the Jews, they had to destroy communities. The reaction of the rabbis was inevitable: they were opposed to Zionism they saw as a company taken from Jews.
It looks like a tragedy: the rabbis accused the Zionists to lose the soul of the Jewish and Zionist rabbis accused of losing their bodies. He had to destroy to save Judaism Jews. Of this issue, we are still paying for today.
should consider this: there is a kind of mutual hatred that underlies the relationship between religious and nonreligious. As leaders of the two currents will stem not and do not discover what they all have in common and that is much greater than what divides them - we live this Kulturkampf.
This dialogue, you think it possible?
He begins to take place in Israeli society since the Yom Kippur War in 1973. We realized that both sides had a common condition, in the existentialist sense of the word. It was at this time born the phrase "Israel as a Jewish state." Non-religious Israelis began to ponder the meaning of Jewish history and religion have become aware of their common destiny with those who have shaped the state.
you think, then, Judaism is not defined primarily by religion. For what type of Judaism you Involved?
There is a minimal definition that can be unanimous: we must attend to the history of that people, regardless of how each fits into it. And there may sometimes have experiences on the negative mode.
You mean being against, is a way to be for?
When is cons is that we are concerned. That said, there are levels of authenticity. There are currents of Jewish life that carry more or less, the authenticity of the community. I substitute for my part, after religious denomination, that of the Torah which clearly implies that the Jewish religion can not be qu'hébraïque. It seems to me that there were three dimensions that define our identity, which until the time of Emancipation unify. It was simultaneously the Jewish relationship to the Land of Israel, the Torah of Israel and people of Israel.
With Emancipation, these three dimensions were disjointed and fragmented. There are still many Jews who participate in three dimensions at once.
Since Emancipation, there are three types of identified Jews in history. Those who define themselves only through participation in the history of the people who prefer the religion (and these have replaced the identity of religious confession the relationship of the Torah), and finally those who assert Jews only by their relationship to the Earth, that is to say the so-called non-religious Zionists.
These three ways of being Jewish all three are legitimate. When deepen their differences, they tend to caricature and to fight.
Our people are subjected to a pressure of today's almost universal story that compels him to resist the risk of extinction.
We had to undergo three bouts, and each of these battles, Jews took advantage of the enemies of their people. First, we tried cut us off from the Torah. We survived and it's already exceptional because we came back after two thousand in Israel with the Torah under his arm. Then they tried to destroy the people, pure and simple. We're in this fight, also won. Today, we want to cut us off from our land.
There is an order of emergency, and you may find it paradoxical that a rabbi tell you that the order of urgency these days, it is not the Torah but the identity of the people and the land, behind which the Torah can be genuine.
But there are Jews today in diaspora, who have no connection either with the Torah, nor the land nor the people of Israel.
This is not new in our history. These Jews highlight the problem of special responsibility worn by rabbis. They too stand in positions that seem to us, seen by Israel, too archaic. If educators were telling the truth to the Jews of the diaspora by explaining that the story is initially that of a nation - and not an appendage of cultural or religious - Jewish consciousness could regain its authenticity.
You not shocked by the fact that most of those who are speaking today on behalf of Judaism in the Diaspora are men detached from any Jewish culture?
Judaism is not an ideology. This is not the cosmopolitan, widespread phenomenon today. There are two thousand years, Christianity has been defined as a religion after the Jewish people, but cut off from the nation of Israel.
I wonder how this cosmopolitan ideology of the diaspora does not present a parallel direction. That is to say identity of Jewish origin but cut the nation Jewish.
What is wrong cosmopolitanism?
It is foreign to Judaism, in that it is defined as not part of any nation. Judaism, it is a nation among the other but with a universal vocation.
As a Sephardic Jew, you are claiming any specificity in the panorama of Jewish today?
Absolutely. I think the bifurcation caused by the Exile did exist two types of Jews. The identity of the Ashkenazi Jew has formulated and expressed in the world of Christian civilization. Sephardic Jew was that of conducted in the Islamic world.
There is a pattern with important biblical Israel, with Ishmael, Isaac's. In Esau is Jacob.
The problem with respect to the non-Jew is different, therefore, as is a Sephardi or Ashkenazi. We were arrested in countries Sephardic, the Muslim who, vis-à-vis Israel conflict on the earth and not heaven. In Ashkenazi countries, we were challenged by the Christian. But the conflict - seriously - of Christianity with Judaism on the sky. Thus the civilization
Christian-they get used to grant citizenship to their Jewish policy, but did they place the Jews in the paradise of the elect? Conversely, the Muslim knows that the sky belongs to the people of Abraham, but he has no place on earth. These two identities have a very long history and rich. They exist and we can not cancel by simple decree. However, they still
identities of exile. As an Israeli who came from the diaspora, I stay all my life, one hundred percent, Sephardic. But I know my children will recognize as an "origin" Sephardic. You
sometimes he feared for the future of Diaspora Jews, faced with the vitality of assimilation, for name changes and sometimes conversions?
For a traditional Jew, the identity of a Jew, whatever his way of connecting to Judaism, is a precious commodity. We are a nation of survivors. And whenever we think of these waves of assimilation, we remember with sadness and concern.
It seems to me that the obstacle to that taken from Jews no longer passes today, overall, by the transmission of the so-called "Jewish values". If only because it is sometimes difficult in a particular language, to distinguish between the message of Christianity and Judaism. Many of our values are now fallen into the public domain. The obstacle to such treatment can not be that the teaching of Hebrew as a language. Away from the Hebrew, assimilation is less strong.
We are however far more worried about the risks posed by the revival of antisemitism. Whenever the cultural symbiosis of Judaism with the local civilization has succeeded, disasters have befallen the Jewish people. This was the case of Spain and Germany .... But today, the Judeo-Christian cultural symbiosis is now succeeding in America and also in Europe, especially France. What will be the outcome?
