New Article: Bernard-Henri Levy and the Impoverishment of Judaism
David Shasha
Bernard-Henri Levy and the Impoverishment of Judaism
I recently made note of the complications of Sephardic Judaism in France in a discussion of Bernard-Henri Levy and Shmuel Trigano:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/davidshasha/P43GxIBbwtw
Professor Trigano was once a bright intellectual presence in the Sephardic community, but he long ago crossed-over to the Ashkenazi side and has acted the part of a dutiful 21st century establishment Jew who only speaks about the evils of Islam, the wonders of Zionism, and the pervasiveness of Anti-Semitism:
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=18181
I have also discussed two of the great Jewish figures in France who have a connection to the Sephardic heritage, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida:
Rabbi Alan Brill recently posted his thoughtful interview with Richard Cohen that provides an excellent introduction to the Jewish thought of Levinas:
Levinas, born in Lithuania, worked for the Alliance Israelite Universelle as director of Talmudic Studies:
https://www.academia.edu/5361273/Emmanuel_Levinas_and_the_New_Science_of_Judaism
Levinas’ AIU students, including his biographer Salomon Malka, were of North African Jewish origin.
The close linkage between the Algerian-born Derrida and Levinas was buttressed by the groundbreaking writings of the Egyptian-born Jewish poet Edmond Jabes and his insightful Post-Holocaust Jewish navigations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmond_Jab%C3%A8s
https://www.academia.edu/482759/Edmond_Jabes_Rabbi-Poet_of_the_Book
Jabes’ monumental seven-volume work The Book of Questions remains one of the most innovative and penetrating examinations of Jewish identity in recent memory. It is a literary masterpiece that draws from our most ancient sources while at the same time occupying a central place in the most cutting-edge philosophical discussions of text and textuality. The work is a sterling example of Radical Traditionalism; an examination of the present filtered through the literary-religious models of the ancient past.
Jabes’ Book of Questions and Levinas’ Difficult Freedom are two of the most important Jewish works in the French language and represent the pinnacle of Post-Modern Jewish thought.
Levinas was perhaps the most important Jewish thinker in 20th century France. His many writings on Jewish subjects and general philosophy present a brilliant extension of the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition of Religious Humanism inaugurated by Moses Mendelssohn and continued by the neo-Kantian group led by Hermann Cohen and his student Ernst Cassirer:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cohen/
I have written a review of Malka’s excellent Levinas biography and posted the classic essay “Loving the Torah More than God,” as well as a section on Levinas from Susan Handelman’s seminal book Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas:
The French Jewish intellectual scene has provided many seminal moments in Modern Judaic thought, often reflecting the classical Sephardic philosophical-ethical heritage of Bahye ibn Paquda and Maimonides and our rich literary-poetic traditions.
The emergence of Post-Modernism under the influence of Derrida and his school brought the complex Midrashic-infused writings of Jabes to wide attention as the precursor of many of the new philosophical trends.
In addition to his famous essay on Levinas entitled “Violence and Metaphysics” in his book Writing and Difference, Derrida included two pieces on the work of Jabes:
https://www.scribd.com/doc/192894490/Derrida-Edmond-Jabes-and-the-Question-of-the-Book
In his classic book Golden Doves with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition Jose Faur presented the connections between Post-Modernism, the Talmudic tradition, and the classical Sephardic heritage:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXQnNIeEJ3aGdSSjQ/view?ths=true
His discussions in the book bring together Maimonides, Derrida, Jabes, Elias Canetti, Jorge Luis Borges, and many others in a heady synthesis that stands out as a milestone in contemporary Jewish thought, even though it has unfairly been ignored by mainstream Jews and scholars.
So it is that we must always remember that Sephardic Judaism is an important component of French culture and its Post-Modern philosophical innovations.
More recently, we can point to the series of graphic novels by Joann Sfar called The Rabbi’s Cat which provide a very colorful and existentially-challenging portrait of North African Jewish life as it collided with France and its Imperial culture:
But those looking for the values of Sephardic Judaism in the work of Bernard-Henri Levy will be sorely disappointed.
As I have previously written, Levy is French Judaism’s equivalent of Alan Dershowitz; a purported Liberal whose views are closer to Neo-Conservatism than either of the men would care to admit.
In a program at Los Angeles’ Wilshire Temple broadcast on C-Span’s Book TV, Levy presented his new book The Genius of Judaism in a conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?421408-2/bernardhenri-levy-discusses-genius-judaism
It must be stated at the outset that Rabbi Wolpe courageously confronted Levy on the way he framed his new book with discussions of Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.
Indeed, Wolpe mused, would it not have been more efficacious to begin with the actual “genius” of Judaism rather than rehash the contentious issues involved with Jew-hatred? Wolpe even referenced Jean-Paul Sartre’s argument in his controversial book Anti-Semite and Jew which reduced the complexity of Judaism to how Gentiles identify us rather than how we identify ourselves.
But in the course of the discussion Levy continued to hammer away on the basic themes presented in the first half of his book which link together Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Zionism to build the basic foundations of his Jewish identity.
It is worthwhile to note that the next-to-last question presented by one of the audience members involved the matter of Jewish exceptionalism and our sometimes tense relationship with non-Jews.
To her credit, the questioner spoke proudly of her work in Interfaith Dialogue groups and the complications that sometimes arise when it comes to the assertion of Jewish superiority, but did not really get a satisfying response from Levy.
Indeed, Levy spent most of the program affirming the very ethnocentrism and chauvinism that now characterizes the mainstream Jewish institutional discourse, much to the enthusiastic approval of the audience.
In his presentation of the Holocaust as absolutely different than all other genocides, Levy fell into the trap of Jewish exceptionalism at any cost. To make things worse, his discussion of Zionism as a necessary corrective to the legacy of Jewish “weakness” was the very thing that has caused so much difficulty for those trying to process Judaism in the larger world today.
It is clear that Levy – a former radical activist in the French Left, and a self-proclaimed “secular” Jew – has now taken on most if not all of the character traits of the Neo-Conservatives with their utopian HASBARAH posture on Zionism and Jewish politics.
We heard much from Levy about Anti-Semitism, but nothing about Le Pen and Trump; the two names that now present a serious conflict with the Right Wing Jewish worldview that Levy proudly represents.
As is the case with Dershowitz, Levy is a Liberal on all matters – except those involving Judaism and Israel. He did not speak of Netanyahu and the Settlers or the creeping Fascism of Naftali Bennett, as he did not speak of reactionary Jewish support for Trumpworld and the populist nationalism of Le Pen in France and Wilders in Holland. We heard a good deal about BDS, but not a word about the National Front.
And while the middle portion of the program provided a fairly good presentation of Levinasian Talmudic textuality, the way that Levy bookended the discussion with Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust on the one side, and Zionism on the other, was something that utterly avoided the actual ethical issues involved with the deeply problematical Neo-Con worldview.
In the course of his rambling soliloquies Levy made mention of Levinas’ student Benny Levy – a French Maoist-turned-Haredi Jew who now lives in Israel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_L%C3%A9vy
We should be aware that the two Levys found their way from the radical Left to the Neo-Con Jewish Right in a way that mirrors the political odyssey of American Jews like Todd Gitlin, David Horowitz, and Ronald Radosh:
http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/304883195.html?FMT=ABS
So when we hear Bernard-Henri Levy presenting his understanding of Judaism we should not only be aware of this political transformation, but his “secular” view of our heritage that is rooted in the debased ideas of the arch-heretic Spinoza:
http://www.bernard-henri-levy.com/baruch-spinoza-23365.html
It is crucial to keep Spinoza in mind when trying to process the ways in which Levy presents Orthodox Judaism, which, like his views on Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Zionism, is deeply uncritical and lacking the necessary detail to see just how divisive Ashkenazi sectarianism really is.
Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust have been crassly manipulated at the service of a Judaism that, as Rabbi Wolpe seemed to understand, has been depleted of its most essential intellectual-religious content.
These things become empty signifiers that have been forcefully yoked to Zionism in a way that presents Judaism as a facile binary conflict between power and powerlessness. To his credit Wolpe tried to press Levy on this point at a number of different times in the discussion, but to little avail.
When Levy was asked by the final questioner what the impact of Israel was on Jewish identity, he continued to rant about weakness and strength in the overall context of Jewish history.
So while it is true that Levy correctly presented many of Levinas’ most important ideas about Jewish textuality as the foundation of a dialectical spiritual life, his love of Spinoza and the militant Spartan values of Zionism are largely in conflict with those of his teacher.
In the Richard Cohen interview we learned of Levinas’ conflict with Spinoza:
Levinas, for whom intelligibility is based first in goodness, of course rejects Spinoza’s positivism. He considers Spinozism to be at the “antipodes” of his thought, because it denies the humanity of the human, denies freedom and transcendence, in its effort to assimilate humanity to the rest of nature. So Levinas’s great antagonist, one might say, is Spinoza and Spinozism.
Cohen also presents the basic position of Levinas on Judaism as a mature ethical system:
The purpose of Judaism for Jews is to produce not good Jews but good human beings – and good human beings who are Jewish are good Jews. The mission of Judaism to the world at large is to produce a good and just humanity. Levinas would agree. Closeness to God is nothing other than this: kindness toward others, a just world for all. Need I quote Micah? Unfortunately all too many people prefer the irresponsibility of children, to have Daddy tell them what to do, to obey orders, as if such formalism were all that God demands. Childhood is one thing; adulthood – bar mitzvah – is another. No wonder, then, that in his many commentaries to Aggadic portions of the Talmud, Levinas discovers always and precisely the call to moral responsibility and the call to justice in all the Jewish texts, beliefs, rituals, and stories. For Levinas ethics is not a nice gloss on Judaism: it is Judaism at its best and nothing less – let us hope – will satisfy the good Jew.
As for Zionism, the matter is a bit more complicated. Though Levinas was a loyal Zionist, his primary aim was not to uphold Jewish empowerment in the face of perceived weakness, but to insist on the inviolability of our ethical tradition in a universal context.
In her 2003 Cross Currents article “The Problem of the Promise: Derrida and Levinas on the Cities of Refuge,” Oona Eisenstadt looks at Derrida’s harsh critique of Levinasian Zionism:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Cross-Currents/98539346.html
The presentation of Levinas’ Zionism is fraught with complications and difficulties when we try to process it in terms of his overall ethical program.
As Professor Eisenstadt states:
What Levinas seems at first glance to mean here is that while Torah requires politics, it also inscribes something beyond politics. Teaching, learning, talking, thinking in connection with this book are better than anything the political can offer, but to describe this by saying that the Torah goes beyond forgiveness is rather extraordinary. Is the Torah not the story and the instrument of divine mercy? Is one of its main purposes not to describe fallibility--or sleepiness--as the human condition, lamentable and at the same time glorious?
Even more controversial is that Levinas links this Torah to the city of Jerusalem, thus making a connection between something that had seemed to be extra-political and the political realm--perhaps even reinscribing the former back into the latter. The connection is made with reference to the lines that close the talmudic passage, lines that evoke the image of a "heavenly Jerusalem" and an "earthly Jerusalem" that are "compacted together." Commenting on these lines, Levinas defines a number of theoretical social levels. First, there is the non-polity of the war of all against all, which Levinas describes by quoting Pirke Avot III.2: "pray for the state, for without it men would eat each other alive." Second, there is the city of refuge or the liberal city, providing security from the chaos of the non-polity: here are the manslaughterers and the half-truths; here is error and forgiveness. Third, there is Jerusalem, which Levinas associates with the Torah he has just described; here we are completely awake; there is no manslaughter (though perhaps there may still be murder), and we are beyond forgiveness. Depending on how one understands Levinas's use of the image of the earthly and heavenly Jerusalem compacted together, this last city may be one or two, and the corresponding total three or four.
Levinas is led to the delineation of levels by the fact that the Talmud speaks of the two Jerusalems and of the cities of refuge in the same passage; he himself adds the Hobbesian pre-political realm into the mix on the authority of Avot. Still, the delineation does not arise obviously from the talmudic text. What, then, is he thinking? There is a hint in the lecture that the threefold model emerges from his reflections on the Holocaust: the camps, the liberal cities that provided refuge from the camps, and then Jerusalem, different in these respects from those liberal cities because, as Levinas says explicitly, it is a mistake to see the significance of the founding of the State of Israel as merely the establishment of a safe place for Jews, its significance in distinction being its relation to the heavenly Jerusalem. But the fourfold model is better mapped, I think, in another way: the place where people eat each other alive is the state of nature, the city of refuge is the present human political condition, the earthly Jerusalem is the messianic era, and the heavenly Jerusalem is the world to come. Keeping this in mind, let us turn to Derrida's questions, and to mine.
Derrida questions Levinas’ Zionism in his 1996 article “A Word of Welcome”:
It seems obvious that Jerusalem--the actual tangible one--is just as sleepy as any other city. Derrida, writing in 1996, mentions the Landau Commission Report that led to the legalization of certain forms of torture for the purpose of interrogation. This hardly represents a complete vigilance; on the contrary, it is clearly a deliberate shutting of the eyes. And though that legislation has been repealed since Derrida wrote his essay, we have ample evidence today of mistakes made in Jerusalem, of the gap between intention and action, in short, of manslaughter. But should awakening from our sleepy state be our goal? Maybe, as Derrida suggests, the road we should be following now is the road not of hospitality beyond hospitality or complete justice but of simple hospitality, of refuge and forgiveness--maybe too, as he also suggests, this is the road of Torah. Kant provides a tentative legal beginning, when he proposes as one of the articles for the peaceful nation that "the rights of men, as citizens of the world" shall be defined by a qualified "universal hospitality." Levinas goes further when he writes, in another essay, that "one belongs to the messianic order when one has been able to admit others among one's own"; it is "the criterion of humanness." In citing these passages, Derrida remains aware that the issue is complicated. Hospitality can never be complete: if one is to invite others into one's home, one must be and remain in some sense the home's owner. He is not necessarily advocating the right of return. But he is, I think, asking whether Levinas's notion of a higher hospitality is not a grand illusion.
Unlike Levy’s extremely facile support for Zionism as presented in the Wilshire Temple program, Derrida interrogates Levinas by making expert use of his basic philosophical-ethical concepts that are placed within the specific context of Israel’s actual actions against Palestinians.
In the context of Judaism it is important, as we see in Derrida’s examination of Levinas, to subject ideas and arguments to the critical test and see what comes of the questioning.
So while Levy the philosopher can certainly dazzle an audience with his intellectual sophistication and erudition, it is all too plain that his positions on Zionism and Anti-Semitism are just part and parcel of the current detritus of mainstream institutional Jewish thinking.
More than this, Levy appears to be ignoring the Sephardic tradition of Jewish Humanism as he relied in the discussion exclusively on citations from the Ashkenazi Orthodox rabbinical tradition, rather than deploy the wide array of Sephardic literary sources.
Levy can cite the lions of the French literary heritage, but seems to have forgotten the seminal figure of Montaigne, who was, like his misbegotten hero Spinoza, a member of the displaced Converso community:
There is indeed a dramatic difference between Spinoza’s rigidly geometric Anti-Jewish historicist polemics and Montaigne’s Ethical Humanism.
Though it is not commonly remarked, Montaigne’s philosophy reflects the bracing Judaic values of the classical Sephardic heritage, recast into the world of the 16th century Renaissance Humanism, which sought a new Liberal ideal rooted in the ethical system that would eventually fuel the project of Levinas and his neo-Kantian forbears.
What we see in Levy, and in so many other reactionary Jewish thinkers today, is an abdication of the very Jewish “genius” that they so arrogantly tout in the shrill tones of Jewish exceptionalism.
The positive response of the Wilshire Temple audience to Levy’s vain Israel triumphalism once again presents an American Jewish community that is hermetically-sealed in its parochial cocoon, seeing the world out of Zionist lenses which presents a Jewish identity firmly rooted in the corrosive persecutions of the Anti-Semites.
Rather than articulate the cosmopolitan values of the classical Sephardic heritage which is his natural birthright, Levy has chosen to ignore those traditions and adopt those of the Ashkenazi Shtetl.
Contemporary Judaism has counter-intuitively reconstructed the Shtetl to fit into the Zionist weltanschauung in a way that refuses the complexities of Modern life. It reduces Jewish identity to a set of paranoid values that have done little to breathe new life into a community that now feels besieged, and which appears unable to accept criticism or make the necessary adjustments to a world in convulsion and instability.
What we really need is the true “genius” of Judaism, but that genius is not to be found in the places that Levy and his Neo-Con allies are looking to.
We must reconstruct contemporary Jewish life by deploying the cosmopolitan Liberalism of the Sephardic tradition of Jewish Humanism, as it is that heritage which contains within it the necessary seeds of Jewish renewal so necessary to ameliorate our current problems.
David Shasha