Revisiting the Jewish Question by Roudinesco Elisabeth

Author:Roudinesco, Elisabeth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

Ultimately, it was all as if modern Jews – the Jews ‘after the catastrophe’, or Jews of the Shoah – were haunted by the terror of their own disappearance. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the philosopher Nachman Krochmal had already focused on the question before Freud turned to it, and had attempted to give a full and detailed answer. His conclusion had been that the Jews ran no risk of disappearing since, having no territory or national identity, they had continued ever since their origins to go through a cycle of growth and decline, being reborn each time through the force of their spirituality.35

But this prophecy became null and void once half of the Jews had become part of a nation like any other, with their own territory and state. Before that, when there had been no state, they were the victims of persecution, pariahs, wanderers, parvenus, assimilated within other nations. But later, as a people with their own state, the Jews of Israel were hostile to one another and had enemies or adversaries just like all citizens integrated within a state. And, on closer examination, if no catastrophe of any significance menaced the Jews of the diaspora after 1945, now protected by laws against racial hatred, the only threat which hung over the Israeli Jews was created by the policies of their governors, which would, after a golden age, become increasingly disastrous and increasingly criticized by the Israelis themselves, especially the brilliant intellectuals, historians, and writers among them: ‘If war threatens the physical survival of Israel’, writes Ilan Greilsammer, ‘its territorial existence, then peace poses a deadly threat to the Israeli social fabric and risks causing its dissolution or implosion. Some people even advise Arabs hostile to the existence of Israel to make peace […] so that the Jewish state will cease to exist by self-destruction at the end of an internal process.’36 This is an alarming idea.

All the debates on genocide and the fear of disappearing clearly show that it was at the very moment of composition of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, aimed to bring to an end any form of racism and to extend to all peoples the benefits of the French Declaration of 1789, that a huge movement started to spread that was critical of its universality. This criticism continued to intensify over the years. The more stridently this universality was asserted by democratic countries which continued to flout it by policies that exploited poor countries, for example in Africa, the more the peoples of those countries started to relativize, to an extreme degree, these principles of justice, law, and equality which stemmed from the declaration, instead of appropriating them.

We should point out at this point that, after successfully imposing the Zionist idea on the Western world, and unhesitatingly cooperating with colonial imperialism, Herzl, as visionary and paradoxical as ever, had dreamt of solving the racial question at the same time as the Jewish question and had laid out his project in

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