From the ARCHIVE: The Sephardic Humanism of Primo Levi Against Elie Wiesel's Hasidic Fatalism
David Shasha
“Arbeit Macht Frei”
By: Primo Levi
As everybody knows, these words could be read above the entrance gate of the Lager at Auschwitz. Their literal meaning is “Work makes you free.” Their true meaning is much less clear; it cannot but leave us puzzled, and it lends itself to a number of observations.
The Lager at Auschwitz was created quite late; it was conceived from the beginning as an extermination camp, not as a labor camp. It became a labor camp only around 1943, and only in part and in an incidental way; and so I think we must assume that that sentence – in the mind of whoever dictated it – was not intended to be understood in its basic sense, in other words in its obvious meaning as a proverb-moral.
It is more likely that the sentence had an ironic meaning, that it arose from that heavy, arrogant, grim vein of humor to which Germans hold the secret, and that only in German has a name. Translated into explicit language, the sentence, it seems, would sound something like this:
“Work is humiliation and suffering, and it is not suitable for us, Herrenvolk, a nation of gentlemen and heroes, but it is for you, enemies of the Third Reich. The freedom that awaits you is death.”
In reality, and despite appearances to the contrary, repudiation of and contempt for the moral value of work was and is essential to the Fascist myth in all its forms. Under all militarism, colonialism, and corporatism lies the precise determination of one class to exploit the work of others, and at the same time to deny them any human worth. This determination was already clear in the anti-worker character that Italian fascism assumed from the beginning, and it continued to assert itself, with increasing precision, in the evolution of fascism in its German version, up to the vast deportation to Germany of workers from all the occupied countries. But it reached its crowning achievement and, at the same time, its reduction to the absurd in the universe of the concentration camp.
The exaltation of violence has the same purpose. It, too, is essential to fascism; the stick, which quickly acquires symbolic value, is the implement used to goad pack and cart animals to work.
The experimental nature of the Lager is evident today, and gives rise to an intense retrospective horror. Today we know that the German camps, both the labor camps and the extermination camps, were not, so to speak, a by-product of a national emergency (first the Nazi revolution, then the war), nor were they a sad, temporary necessity. Rather, they represented the first, precocious buds of the New Order. In the New Order, certain human races (Jews, Gypsies) would be eliminated. Others, for example the Slavs in general and the Russians in particular, would be enslaved and subjected to a carefully planned regimen of biological degradation that would transform them into useful beasts of burden, illiterate, devoid of any initiative, incapable of rebellion or criticism.
So the camps were, in substance, “pilot plants,” harbingers of the future assigned to Europe in the Nazi plans. In light of these considerations, sentences like “Work makes you free” at Auschwitz, or like “To each his own” at Buchenwald, take on a precise and sinister meaning. They are the portents of the new Tablets of the Law, dictated by the master to the slave, and true only for the latter.
If fascism had prevailed, the whole of Europe would have been transformed into a complex system of forced-labor camps and extermination camps, and those words, cynically uplifting, would be read over the entrance to every workshop and construction site.
Translated from the Italian by Alessandra Bastagli and Francesco Bastagli
Originally published in Triangolo Rosso, ANED (Associazione Nazionale Ex-Deportati), November 1959
From The Complete Works of Primo Levi, Vol. 2, Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949-1980, pp. 1134-1135
Seeing Primo Levi Outside the Parameters of the Sephardic Tradition
This past week saw two important reviews of the newly-published “Complete Works of Primo Levi”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/books/review/the-complete-works-of-primo-levi.html?ref=review
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/why-primo-levi-survives/413134/
The review from The New York Times Sunday Book review by Edward Mendelson sees Levi as an exponent of the Secular Jewish tradition who spoke little about his relationship to the Piedmontese Italian Jewish community he was a part of:
François Rabelais, writing in the 16th century, “doesn’t resemble us,” Levi said, “but he feels close to us as a model for the way he writes, so alien to categories and rules.” Levi’s disdain for categories and rules — or anything that tries to shape reality from outside — is everywhere in his work, from his contempt for the Lager’s murderous rules about Jews as a category to his indifference to Jewish ritual and law. Judaism interested him as a culture, not as a religion. He wrote almost nothing about the beliefs of his Piedmontese Jewish ancestors, but much about their distinctive dialect and vocabulary.
And while it is certainly true that Levi was an avowed non-believer, his writings display the ethos of the Sephardic tradition in its passionate embrace of the human and the ethical embedded in culture and history. The Periodic Table is suffused with anecdotal information about Levi’s family and the historical culture of the community he was raised in. It is a snapshot of a world now lost to us.
Avoiding the Sephardic tradition of Jewish Humanism and the cultural-intellectual history of that tradition, which is an inclusive one, is a critical error made by many of the reviewers who look at Levi strictly from the perspective of Ashkenazi-European culture.
In a less-than-flattering review in The Atlantic, William Deresiewicz typifies a critical problem when “professionals” judge Levi’s “amateur” literary art:
The Complete Works of Primo Levi, in its very girth and exhaustiveness, asserts a claim about the man whose oeuvre it collects. Best known for his Holocaust memoir, If This Is a Man, as well as for The Periodic Table—a book about his life in, with, and through chemistry—Levi should be seen, as the collection’s publicity material puts it, as “one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.” Novels, stories, poems, essays, science writing, science fiction, newspaper columns, articles, open letters, book reviews: His every word is worth preserving, translating, purchasing, pondering. To read them all together, the collection insists, is to see the man anew.
I say this with reluctance—The Complete Works, which was 15 years in the making, is clearly a labor of love, meticulously edited by Ann Goldstein and seamlessly carried over from Italian, in fresh renditions, by a team of 10 translators—but the claim, on the volumes’ own evidence, is manifestly false. Levi is a great writer. He is a vivid writer, an unflinching writer, an indispensable writer. But he is also a limited writer, both in talents and in range. It does no favors, to the reader or to him, to try to rank him with the likes of Joyce, Proust, Kafka, and Beckett. His achievement, in his work about the Holocaust and its aftermath—If This Is a Man, The Truce, and The Drowned and the Saved, as well as parts of Lilith and The Periodic Table—is significant enough. Surrounding that achievement with masses of ephemera only obscures it. A selected works, at half the length for half the price (The Complete Works lists for $100), would have served him better.
Later in the review Deresiewicz attacks Levi’s most important work The Periodic Table for its lack of organizational structure:
Levi went on to publish three more book-length works of narrative: The Periodic Table (1975), The Wrench (1978), and If Not Now, When? (1982). The first was voted “the best science book ever written” in a contest sponsored by The Guardian in 2006 and finally won its author an American audience, amidst ecstatic reviews, upon its publication in the United States, in 1984, but it is considerably less worthy, in my view, than its reputation suggests. It is a fine book by any standard, and some of its 21 chapters—especially the first, on Levi’s family history—rise to the level of his best work. But its organizing principle, keying each of its vignettes to one of the chemical elements, is less a unitary concept than an excuse to gather together a heterogeneous mass of material (an impression confirmed by the textual notes included in The Complete Works). The book tries to do too many things: illuminate the life of a working chemist; flesh out its author’s biography, particularly in the years before his deportation; rescue bits of uncollected fiction. Levi’s genius ran to shorter units—the episode, the anecdote, the tale. Larger structures tended to elude him.
Levi, like his fellow countrymen Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, and his Piedmontese Sephardic Jewish peers Umberto Cassuto and Arnaldo Momigliano, presents a complex literary edifice that is rooted in logic and science, but which aggressively embraces the myriad arts of the fabulist. Imagination and rationality come together in these literary works, and coherence is a product of the clash of sensibilities; the Hebraic and Hellenic, the Eastern and Western, the traditional and the modern.
What both reviewers seem to miss in their analyses is the very Sephardic cacophony and complexity that comes from a very long literary heritage rooted in Talmudic-Midrashic dialectics and the poetic conceits of the Arab-Andalusian heritage that are critical elements of Jewish Humanism. The classic Melisa (Hebrew, eloquence) style of the Sephardim is not the same as European social realism as it more closely resembles the poetic Bricolage of the Post-Modernists. It is helpful to understand this tradition when looking at these texts.
It is unfortunate that the Ashkenazi-Western sensibility has sought to silence and erase this Sephardic tradition. By limiting Primo Levi’s writing to such constrictive categories such readings fail to grasp his complexity. By marking him as an “Atheist” or as a sloppy writer we miss the complex Jewish nature of his thinking; a Judaism that is not simply a form of Secular Humanism, but which remains rooted in the complexities of Sephardic culture and history.
The writing of Primo Levi continues to present a much-needed contrast to the dark fatalism of Ashkenazim like Elie Wiesel. In his masterpiece The Periodic Table we have deeply complex ruminations on science, humanity, and morality presented in the form of a poetic meditation on history, culture, and human identity in the shadow of the Holocaust.
Levi presents a radically different understanding of Jewish tradition that must not be processed in the usual Ashkenazi categories which seek to limit the boundaries of Jewish expression by reifying categories like “religious” and “secular.” Levi’s writing explodes such conventional thinking and remains a welcome part of the Sephardic tradition and the concept of Religious Humanism.
David Shasha
From SHU 717, December 23, 2015
Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi: A Study in Contrasts
The late Elie Wiesel was an immensely complicated figure who helped raise public awareness of the Holocaust, but who also became consumed by his own celebrity and the immense power he wielded in the world.
It is hard not to compare the careers of Wiesel and the Italian-Sephardi Primo Levi who both survived the hell of Auschwitz, but who took very different paths to express their witness.
The stark contrast between their approaches could not be more pronounced: Levi was very much a man of rationalism, science, and literature who sought to provide a more humanistic understanding of the tragedy he experienced, while Wiesel emphasized Jewish ethnocentrism and remained wedded to the alienated Ashkenazi view of the world. Wiesel was a tortured believer, while Levi was very much a non-believer who provided a more panoramic view of culture and civilization.
Wiesel was a key part of the Abe Foxman/Alan Dershowitz institutional axis, while Levi continued in the intellectual path of the Sephardic tradition and could be seen in the line of great writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Umberto Eco.
The Levi vision is on full display in the many writings contained in the massive Complete Works which was recently published in a handsome three-volume edition by Norton:
I have commented on Levi as a Sephardic writer in the following article:
And there is the problem of how Ashkenazim have dealt with Levi’s work and the HASBARAH biases that they bring to the discussion:
The differences between Wiesel and Levi and their approaches to the Holocaust and to the world are very much a product of the Ashkenazi-Sephardi split.
Wiesel lived his life in a way that reflected the Shtetl mentality of the Eastern European Jews. No matter how far he had moved in physical terms from the nightmare world of the Nazis, or how much public fame he garnered, his extensive advocacy on Holocaust matters and on human rights was always tied to these formative Ashkenazi foundations and its religious-theological complexities and muddled contradictions.
Levi on the other hand represented the cultural pluralism of the Sephardic tradition and its innate Cosmopolitan values.
Levi was an assimilated European Jew who was sometimes attacked by Ashkenazi ethnocentrists for not being “Jewish” enough, while Wiesel was intimately tied to the Jewish establishment that has so ill-served our people.
It was unfortunate, but not altogether unexpected, to see Wiesel victimized in the Bernie Madoff swindle:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/business/27madoff.html
Like many members of the American Jewish establishment, Wiesel was hoodwinked by Madoff who presented himself as a solid member of the Zionist tribe, a loyal adherent of what has now become the primary cause of the Jewish community. Wiesel was bilked out of his personal fortune as well as money earmarked for his charitable foundation.
He once famously compared Madoff to God:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/27/wiesel.madoff/
Where Primo Levi shied away from the spotlight and was often made uncomfortable by this alienated Jewish ethnocentrism, Elie Wiesel was always front-and-center in the establishment Jewish community, and fully devoted to promoting its reactionary political values.
Sunday’s e-mail newsletter from Arutz Sheva reminded us of the high esteem that Wiesel is held in the Settler community.
The newsletter contained no less than four separate articles on Wiesel:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/214397
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/214405
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/214413
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/214406
From the looks of it, Wiesel is a figure much-beloved in the Settler community and by Hard-Line Zionists more generally. He famously refused to speak out on behalf of the suffering inflicted by Israel on the Palestinian community, preferring instead to rubber-stamp official Israeli policy and remain silent on the issue of Jewish persecution of others, at the same time that he was extremely vocal on the issue of human rights for other oppressed groups in the world.
It is interesting to note that the lengthy New York Times obituary made no mention of the Palestine Question in Wiesel’s very extensive record of human rights advocacy:
For a critical look at Wiesel’s career there is the excellent article at Mondoweiss by Marc Ellis that does raise these troubling issues:
Zachary Braiterman provides a valiant, but often incoherent PILPUL argument trying to justify Wiesel’s many hypocrisies and moral failings:
https://jewishphilosophyplace.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/elie-wiesel-his-critics-israel-palestine/
There has been a rush to attack those who use Wiesel’s own moral values to criticize him, and then there are those who wish to valorize him at any cost.
In the final assessment, Wiesel contributed a great deal to our understanding of the Holocaust, while presenting this history in a framework fraught with the many problems and complications of the Ashkenazi experience and its difficult Jewish process.
By contrast, Levi’s struggle against Fascism always had the Universal as its primary focus.
In his text “Arbeit Macht Frei” we see that this universality was always uppermost in his mind:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/arbeit/davidshasha/_eeXhBLCpCk/yTbFODagAAAJ
The Holocaust was not strictly limited to Jews and Judaism, though it is obvious that Anti-Semitism played an oversize role in the barbaric Nazi movement. Levi consistently presented the matter in the framework of a universalistic concern for humanity.
The following is a key passage from the essay that typifies Levi’s understanding of the nefarious Nazi ideology:
In reality, and despite appearances to the contrary, repudiation of and contempt for the moral value of work was and is essential to the Fascist myth in all its forms. Under all militarism, colonialism, and corporatism lies the precise determination of one class to exploit the work of others, and at the same time to deny them any human worth. This determination was already clear in the anti-worker character that Italian fascism assumed from the beginning, and it continued to assert itself, with increasing precision, in the evolution of fascism in its German version, up to the vast deportation to Germany of workers from all the occupied countries. But it reached its crowning achievement and, at the same time, its reduction to the absurd in the universe of the concentration camp.
It is also important to mention here Levi’s much-discussed formulation of the “Gray Zone” which is a central thesis in his magisterial final book The Drowned and the Saved; a profound philosophical-moral interpretation of his experiences of the debased Concentration Camp universe:
We tend to simplify history, too, although we cannot always agree on the outline within which to organize facts, and consequently different historians may understand and construct history in incompatible ways. But our need to divide the field between “us” and “them” is so strong – perhaps for reasons rooted in our origins as social animals – that this one scheme, the friend-enemy dichotomy, prevails over all others. Popular history, and even history as it is traditionally taught in schools, reflects this Manichean tendency to shun nuance and complexity, and to reduce the river of human events to conflicts, and conflicts to duels, us and them, the Athenians and the Spartans, the Romans and the Carthaginians. (Complete Works, volume 3, p. 2430)
A few pages later he provides a precise formulation of how this Manicheanism is essentially false:
The truth remains that in the concentration camps and outside them, there are people who are gray, ambiguous, and quick to compromise. The extreme tension of the camp tends to augment their numbers. They bear their own share of guilt (increasing in proportion to their freedom of choice), in addition to which there are the vectors and instruments of the system’s guilt. The truth remains that most of the oppressors, during or (more often) after their actions, realized the evil they were doing or had done, and may have had misgivings, felt uneasy, or may have been punished, but their suffering is not enough for them to be counted among the victims. By the same token, the mistakes and capitulations of the prisoners are not enough to align them with their jailers: the inmates of the camps – hundreds of thousands of people from every social class and every country in Europe – represented an average, unselected sampling of humanity. Even if we leave aside the infernal environment into which they had been abruptly plunged, it is illogical to expect from them – and rhetorical and false to claim that everyone always practiced – the behavior of saints and Stoic philosophers. (Complete Works, volume 3, p. 2440)
Levi’s “Gray Zone” is a bold attempt to analyze human motivations and behaviors in a complex and nuanced manner that might still seem somewhat shocking to our simplistic sensibilities as we ponder the nightmare that is presented by Auschwitz and how it operated.
The “Gray Zone” is a very difficult philosophical idea that was not possible in Wiesel’s vision of Auschwitz, but does indeed reflect Levi’s deeply rational and transparent vision of what he saw and experienced.
And in contradistinction to Wiesel’s adamant refusal to criticize Israel, Levi remained fully committed to his moral vision of Universal Justice.
At the time of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 Levi wrote a heatedly polemical article “Who Has Courage in Jerusalem?” that was published in Turin’s La Stampa, Levi’s hometown newspaper, which had been publishing his columns, stories, and essays since 1968.
It is worth citing the following passage from this very courageous article:
I fear that this undertaking, with its frightening cost in lives, will inflict on Judaism a degradation difficult to cure, and will damage its image. I sense in myself, not without surprise, a profound emotional link with Israel, but not with this Israel.
The Palestinian problem exists: it can’t be denied. It can’t be resolved in the Arafat manner, by denying Israel the right to exist, but it cannot be resolved in the Begin manner, either. Anwar Sadat was neither a genius nor a saint; he was only a man endowed with imagination, common sense, and courage, and he was killed because he had opened up a pathway. Is there no one, in Israel or elsewhere, who is capable of continuing it? (Complete Works, volume 3, p. 2597)
In one of the closing sections of the Complete Works, “Notes on the Texts,” Domenico Scarpa recounts that Levi soon joined other Italian Jewish intellectuals in calling for Begin’s resignation:
Although Levi could not have wanted it or predicted it, [his novel] If Not Now, When? came out at a bitter historical moment, shortly before the Israeli Army invaded Lebanon. He and other intellectuals of Jewish origin distanced themselves from those acts of war. Levi went so far as to call for the government of Menachem Begin to resign. On July 11, 1982, advertisements for the novel came out with the headline “Tyre Sidon Beirut, June-July 1982,” referring to the cities where the bloodiest clashes between Israelis and Palestinians had taken place. (Complete Works, volume 3, p. 2860)
Scarpa notes that the ads for the book provided two Biblical quotes addressed to each of the warring parties.
Levi refused to check his morality at the door when it came to Israel. Though an ardent Zionist for many years, he was not a man who could stand idly by and not speak his mind when he thought that things were wrong.
For his outspoken and courageous stand on the Lebanon War, Levi found himself attacked by Fernanda Eberstadt in the October 1985 issue of Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary magazine:
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/reading-primo-levi/
Shockingly, Eberstadt does not consider Levi “Jewish” enough:
As a writer, Primo Levi represents a relatively unfamiliar combination in the literature of the Nazi concentration camps. He is a survivor without Jewish—or, more specifically, without East European—inflections, a memoirist endowed with all the fruits of a classical Mediterranean education, an aesthete, a skeptic, a mild, equable, and eminently civilized man who is more at home in Dante and Homer than in the Bible. Some of the qualities he brings to his work—secularism, cultivation, elitism (coupled with an attitude of amused affection toward the common man), and a lack of deep familiarity with Jewish history or religion—are typical of his generation of Italian Jewish writers. Virtues that are his alone include precision, economy, subtlety, a dry and rueful wit, an intimate understanding of the dramatic potential of understatement, and a certain frigidity of manner which combines effectively with the explosiveness of his subject matter.
Levi responded to the vicious attack in Commentary with a scathing letter to the editor that was published in the February 1986 issue. The letter has now been republished in the Complete Works, volume 3, pp. 2719-2721.
Eberstadt never once explicitly mentions Levi’s attack on Begin and Israel’s Lebanon Invasion, but, in addition to the standard Anti-Sephardi racism, the article seethes with a pent-up hostility towards those Jews who do not tow the party line.
It was a lesson that Wiesel understood very well, and it is well-nigh impossible to imagine him addressing the Israeli government as Levi did in 1982, just as it is difficult to imagine him speaking of the Holocaust in a way that does not emphasize a strictly Jewish ethnocentrism.
The Holocaust has been used in ways both legitimate and illegitimate and it has often been difficult to ferret out the differences. At one point Zionists were silent on the issue of the Holocaust, seeing European Jews as cowards, but over time began to realize that the tragedy could be used for HASBARAH purposes.
The catastrophe of the Holocaust is one that will continue to eat away at all of us and our reading of the texts of survivors like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi will serve as a key entry-point in dealing with what is often an unspeakably painful examination of the very depths of human depravity.
David Shasha
From SHU 750, August 10, 2016
Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi: A Study in Contrasts
The late Elie Wiesel was an immensely complicated figure who helped raise public awareness of the Holocaust, but who also became consumed by his own celebrity and the immense power he wielded in the world.
It is hard not to compare the careers of Wiesel and the Italian-Sephardi Primo Levi who both survived the hell of Auschwitz, but who took very different paths to express their witness.
The stark contrast between their approaches could not be more pronounced: Levi was very much a man of rationalism, science, and literature who sought to provide a more humanistic understanding of the tragedy he experienced, while Wiesel emphasized Jewish ethnocentrism and remained wedded to the alienated Ashkenazi view of the world. Wiesel was a tortured believer, while Levi was very much a non-believer who provided a more panoramic view of culture and civilization.
Wiesel was a key part of the Abe Foxman/Alan Dershowitz institutional axis, while Levi continued in the intellectual path of the Sephardic tradition and could be seen in the line of great writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Umberto Eco.
The Levi vision is on full display in the many writings contained in the massive Complete Works which was recently published in a handsome three-volume edition by Norton:
I have commented on Levi as a Sephardic writer in the following article:
And there is the problem of how Ashkenazim have dealt with Levi’s work and the HASBARAH biases that they bring to the discussion:
The differences between Wiesel and Levi and their approaches to the Holocaust and to the world are very much a product of the Ashkenazi-Sephardi split.
Wiesel lived his life in a way that reflected the Shtetl mentality of the Eastern European Jews. No matter how far he had moved in physical terms from the nightmare world of the Nazis, or how much public fame he garnered, his extensive advocacy on Holocaust matters and on human rights was always tied to these formative Ashkenazi foundations and its religious-theological complexities and muddled contradictions.
Levi on the other hand represented the cultural pluralism of the Sephardic tradition and its innate Cosmopolitan values.
Levi was an assimilated European Jew who was sometimes attacked by Ashkenazi ethnocentrists for not being “Jewish” enough, while Wiesel was intimately tied to the Jewish establishment that has so ill-served our people.
It was unfortunate, but not altogether unexpected, to see Wiesel victimized in the Bernie Madoff swindle:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/business/27madoff.html
Like many members of the American Jewish establishment, Wiesel was hoodwinked by Madoff who presented himself as a solid member of the Zionist tribe, a loyal adherent of what has now become the primary cause of the Jewish community. Wiesel was bilked out of his personal fortune as well as money earmarked for his charitable foundation.
He once famously compared Madoff to God:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/27/wiesel.madoff/
Where Primo Levi shied away from the spotlight and was often made uncomfortable by this alienated Jewish ethnocentrism, Elie Wiesel was always front-and-center in the establishment Jewish community, and fully devoted to promoting its reactionary political values.
Sunday’s e-mail newsletter from Arutz Sheva reminded us of the high esteem that Wiesel is held in the Settler community.
The newsletter contained no less than four separate articles on Wiesel:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/214397
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/214405
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/214413
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/214406
From the looks of it, Wiesel is a figure much-beloved in the Settler community and by Hard-Line Zionists more generally. He famously refused to speak out on behalf of the suffering inflicted by Israel on the Palestinian community, preferring instead to rubber-stamp official Israeli policy and remain silent on the issue of Jewish persecution of others, at the same time that he was extremely vocal on the issue of human rights for other oppressed groups in the world.
It is interesting to note that the lengthy New York Times obituary made no mention of the Palestine Question in Wiesel’s very extensive record of human rights advocacy:
For a critical look at Wiesel’s career there is the excellent article at Mondoweiss by Marc Ellis that does raise these troubling issues:
Zachary Braiterman provides a valiant, but often incoherent PILPUL argument trying to justify Wiesel’s many hypocrisies and moral failings:
https://jewishphilosophyplace.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/elie-wiesel-his-critics-israel-palestine/
There has been a rush to attack those who use Wiesel’s own moral values to criticize him, and then there are those who wish to valorize him at any cost.
In the final assessment, Wiesel contributed a great deal to our understanding of the Holocaust, while presenting this history in a framework fraught with the many problems and complications of the Ashkenazi experience and its difficult Jewish process.
By contrast, Levi’s struggle against Fascism always had the Universal as its primary focus.
In his text “Arbeit Macht Frei” we see that this universality was always uppermost in his mind:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/arbeit/davidshasha/_eeXhBLCpCk/yTbFODagAAAJ
The Holocaust was not strictly limited to Jews and Judaism, though it is obvious that Anti-Semitism played an oversize role in the barbaric Nazi movement. Levi consistently presented the matter in the framework of a universalistic concern for humanity.
The following is a key passage from the essay that typifies Levi’s understanding of the nefarious Nazi ideology:
In reality, and despite appearances to the contrary, repudiation of and contempt for the moral value of work was and is essential to the Fascist myth in all its forms. Under all militarism, colonialism, and corporatism lies the precise determination of one class to exploit the work of others, and at the same time to deny them any human worth. This determination was already clear in the anti-worker character that Italian fascism assumed from the beginning, and it continued to assert itself, with increasing precision, in the evolution of fascism in its German version, up to the vast deportation to Germany of workers from all the occupied countries. But it reached its crowning achievement and, at the same time, its reduction to the absurd in the universe of the concentration camp.
It is also important to mention here Levi’s much-discussed formulation of the “Gray Zone” which is a central thesis in his magisterial final book The Drowned and the Saved; a profound philosophical-moral interpretation of his experiences of the debased Concentration Camp universe:
We tend to simplify history, too, although we cannot always agree on the outline within which to organize facts, and consequently different historians may understand and construct history in incompatible ways. But our need to divide the field between “us” and “them” is so strong – perhaps for reasons rooted in our origins as social animals – that this one scheme, the friend-enemy dichotomy, prevails over all others. Popular history, and even history as it is traditionally taught in schools, reflects this Manichean tendency to shun nuance and complexity, and to reduce the river of human events to conflicts, and conflicts to duels, us and them, the Athenians and the Spartans, the Romans and the Carthaginians. (Complete Works, volume 3, p. 2430)
A few pages later he provides a precise formulation of how this Manicheanism is essentially false:
The truth remains that in the concentration camps and outside them, there are people who are gray, ambiguous, and quick to compromise. The extreme tension of the camp tends to augment their numbers. They bear their own share of guilt (increasing in proportion to their freedom of choice), in addition to which there are the vectors and instruments of the system’s guilt. The truth remains that most of the oppressors, during or (more often) after their actions, realized the evil they were doing or had done, and may have had misgivings, felt uneasy, or may have been punished, but their suffering is not enough for them to be counted among the victims. By the same token, the mistakes and capitulations of the prisoners are not enough to align them with their jailers: the inmates of the camps – hundreds of thousands of people from every social class and every country in Europe – represented an average, unselected sampling of humanity. Even if we leave aside the infernal environment into which they had been abruptly plunged, it is illogical to expect from them – and rhetorical and false to claim that everyone always practiced – the behavior of saints and Stoic philosophers. (Complete Works, volume 3, p. 2440)
Levi’s “Gray Zone” is a bold attempt to analyze human motivations and behaviors in a complex and nuanced manner that might still seem somewhat shocking to our simplistic sensibilities as we ponder the nightmare that is presented by Auschwitz and how it operated.
The “Gray Zone” is a very difficult philosophical idea that was not possible in Wiesel’s vision of Auschwitz, but does indeed reflect Levi’s deeply rational and transparent vision of what he saw and experienced.
And in contradistinction to Wiesel’s adamant refusal to criticize Israel, Levi remained fully committed to his moral vision of Universal Justice.
At the time of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 Levi wrote a heatedly polemical article “Who Has Courage in Jerusalem?” that was published in Turin’s La Stampa, Levi’s hometown newspaper, which had been publishing his columns, stories, and essays since 1968.
It is worth citing the following passage from this very courageous article:
I fear that this undertaking, with its frightening cost in lives, will inflict on Judaism a degradation difficult to cure, and will damage its image. I sense in myself, not without surprise, a profound emotional link with Israel, but not with this Israel.
The Palestinian problem exists: it can’t be denied. It can’t be resolved in the Arafat manner, by denying Israel the right to exist, but it cannot be resolved in the Begin manner, either. Anwar Sadat was neither a genius nor a saint; he was only a man endowed with imagination, common sense, and courage, and he was killed because he had opened up a pathway. Is there no one, in Israel or elsewhere, who is capable of continuing it? (Complete Works, volume 3, p. 2597)
In one of the closing sections of the Complete Works, “Notes on the Texts,” Domenico Scarpa recounts that Levi soon joined other Italian Jewish intellectuals in calling for Begin’s resignation:
Although Levi could not have wanted it or predicted it, [his novel] If Not Now, When? came out at a bitter historical moment, shortly before the Israeli Army invaded Lebanon. He and other intellectuals of Jewish origin distanced themselves from those acts of war. Levi went so far as to call for the government of Menachem Begin to resign. On July 11, 1982, advertisements for the novel came out with the headline “Tyre Sidon Beirut, June-July 1982,” referring to the cities where the bloodiest clashes between Israelis and Palestinians had taken place. (Complete Works, volume 3, p. 2860)
Scarpa notes that the ads for the book provided two Biblical quotes addressed to each of the warring parties.
Levi refused to check his morality at the door when it came to Israel. Though an ardent Zionist for many years, he was not a man who could stand idly by and not speak his mind when he thought that things were wrong.
For his outspoken and courageous stand on the Lebanon War, Levi found himself attacked by Fernanda Eberstadt in the October 1985 issue of Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary magazine:
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/reading-primo-levi/
Shockingly, Eberstadt does not consider Levi “Jewish” enough:
As a writer, Primo Levi represents a relatively unfamiliar combination in the literature of the Nazi concentration camps. He is a survivor without Jewish—or, more specifically, without East European—inflections, a memoirist endowed with all the fruits of a classical Mediterranean education, an aesthete, a skeptic, a mild, equable, and eminently civilized man who is more at home in Dante and Homer than in the Bible. Some of the qualities he brings to his work—secularism, cultivation, elitism (coupled with an attitude of amused affection toward the common man), and a lack of deep familiarity with Jewish history or religion—are typical of his generation of Italian Jewish writers. Virtues that are his alone include precision, economy, subtlety, a dry and rueful wit, an intimate understanding of the dramatic potential of understatement, and a certain frigidity of manner which combines effectively with the explosiveness of his subject matter.
Levi responded to the vicious attack in Commentary with a scathing letter to the editor that was published in the February 1986 issue. The letter has now been republished in the Complete Works, volume 3, pp. 2719-2721.
Eberstadt never once explicitly mentions Levi’s attack on Begin and Israel’s Lebanon Invasion, but, in addition to the standard Anti-Sephardi racism, the article seethes with a pent-up hostility towards those Jews who do not tow the party line.
It was a lesson that Wiesel understood very well, and it is well-nigh impossible to imagine him addressing the Israeli government as Levi did in 1982, just as it is difficult to imagine him speaking of the Holocaust in a way that does not emphasize a strictly Jewish ethnocentrism.
The Holocaust has been used in ways both legitimate and illegitimate and it has often been difficult to ferret out the differences. At one point Zionists were silent on the issue of the Holocaust, seeing European Jews as cowards, but over time began to realize that the tragedy could be used for HASBARAH purposes.
The catastrophe of the Holocaust is one that will continue to eat away at all of us and our reading of the texts of survivors like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi will serve as a key entry-point in dealing with what is often an unspeakably painful examination of the very depths of human depravity.
David Shasha
From SHU 750, August 10, 2016