Thank you, Fadiey Lovsky

Fadiey Lovsky passed away this past May 23 at the age of a hundred years old. As is often the case for those who row against the current, he remains relatively unknown outside the circle of Jewish-Christian relations – and probably even less known in English-speaking countries where, as far as I know, his books have not been translated. Yet this Protestant Christian historian, both big-hearted and spiritual, is one of the most important contemporary authors in the field of Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, as well as in the field of relations between the Church and the Jewish people.

Born in Paris in 1914, he awoke to the faith at the end of his adolescence. His sensitivity led him towards a pietistic form of Protestantism and to become a member of Union de Prière de Charmes. A professor of history in a high school, he was able to say at the end of his life "I was protected from the temptation of pursuing a career."

Tongue in cheek, he credited "Herr Hitler" with his interest for the Jewish people and his involvement in the Jewish-Christian dialogue. He was also close to Jules Isaac, whom he helped to find a publisher for his book Jésus et Israël (Jesus and Israel, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971) and with whom he was one of the founders of l’Amitié judéo-chrétienne de France (the Judeo-Christian Friendship of France).

Besides holding senior posts in various bodies of the Protestant Federation of France for relations with the people of Israel, he assumed, for some forty years, responsibility for the Cahiers d’Etudes juives (Review for Jewish Studies).

Finally, Lovsky had a passion for the unity of the Church. For him, the division among the various Christian denominations is but the consequence of the original split between the Church and the Synagogue.

His main works, in French, are:

1. On the mystery of Israel, anti-Semitism and the relationship between the Church and the Jews:

- Antisémitisme et mystère d’Israël, Albin Michel, 1955. A digital version is available on Pressbooks.

- L’antisémitisme chrétien, Ed. du Cerf, 1970.

- La déchirure de l’absence. Essai sur les rapports entre l’Eglise du Christ et le peuple d’Israël, Calmann-Lévy, 1971.

2. On the unity of the Church:

- Pauvrette Eglise, Mame, 1992.

- L’unité, une option non facultative, Olivetan, 1999.

3. On his life and his commitments

- an interview with the journalist Robert Masson, La Fidélité de Dieu, Parole et Silence/Cerf, 1998.

The best tribute we can pay him is by allowing him to speak for himself. Here is a page from La déchirure de l’absence (The Rupture of Absence).

“After Hitler, is forgiveness still possible? But is it not precisely when we, Jews or Christians, are reluctant to respond that Hitler in fact triumphs by having made it impossible? And if forgiveness is the key that opens all doors, who is it that must use this key? To whom is it to be offered? To whom is it to be requested? Is it time for us today to propose it to the Jews, we who do not know how to use it? Might it not be the moment for us to be the first to ask this forgiveness from the Jews? And what should we do, if they refuse, for any number of reasons to grant it to us?

We know too well how hard it is to live this grace asked for daily^(*) how hard to pass it on, yet how easily, how lightly it is asked from others, as if the grace that is given to us could become a duty that we would propose to them. Still, Christians have nothing else to transmit than a forgiveness that reconciles. If they are unable to speak about it, they can live it, that is to say, as the case may be, to grant it or ask for it.

When it comes to the relationships of Christians with the people of Israel, it is only on the ground of forgiveness that the meeting can take place. Perhaps it wouldn’t be in vain to dot the i's and cross the t's: for this meeting and this dialogue, it is Christians who must first ask forgiveness from God and from the people of Israel, that is to say, from the Jews.”

Fiodor

(*) Allusion to the Lord’s Prayer.

Irrational anti-Semitism

Barbara Tuchman

By reading the French translation of a commentary on the Book of Exodus⁽¹⁾ published a few years ago by an American rabbi belonging to Reformed Judaism, I was struck by a sidebar entitled "The causes of anti-Semitism." The author quotes the American historian Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989, Pulitzer Prize 1963), who identifies three "principles" at the source of anti-Semitism:

1. "It is vain to expect logic – that is to say, a reasoned appreciation of enlightened self-interest" when it comes to anti-Semitism.

2. Appeasement is futile. "The rule of human behavior here is that yielding to an enemy’s demands does not satisfy them but, by exhibiting a position of weakness, augments them. Its does not terminate hostility but excites it."

3. ""Anti-Semitism is independent of its object. What Jews do or fail to do is not the determinant. The impetus comes out of the needs of the persecutors and a particular political climate."

These principles, if already old - they had been published in Newsweek on February 3, 1975 - seem particularly insightful and well adapted to the current context. It is a distressing statement because we experience how difficult it is to convince or to fight using ideas. It is also a warning and an invitation not to give in an inch on the principles and not to lower one’s guard...

(1) H. J. Fields, A Torah Commentary for Our Times, vol. 2: Exodus and Leviticus. New York, Union for Reform Judaism, 1990.

Fiodor

Dostoevsky anti-Semitic?

Dostoevsky in 1876

I just finished reading a remarkable book about Dostoevsky’s philosophy⁽¹⁾. One chapter of the book particularly caught my attention. The author demonstrates that the charge of anti-Semitism leveled against the writer is unfounded. It reminded me of an article that I published here in September 2012: “A spot on the beautiful garment”. It was about a so-called anti-Semitism of Dostoevsky. When that article was published, Pierre Lamblé sent me a comment in which he strongly disagreed with this assertion. He wrote: “The anti-Semitism of Dostoevsky is a myth based on nonsense, on a misunderstanding on the nature of his work, of his conditions of work and production, and on anachronisms. We cannot comment on what D. wrote about the Jews in his time with our current criteria of reading; in reality, he consistently expressed feelings of sympathy for the Jews in general, and especially in his works of fiction”. And he invited me to read a chapter he devoted to this issue in his book. I followed his advice and found convincing answers in the ten pages he dedicates to the question, in a section entitled “The Politics of Dostoevsky”. In these pages, Lamblé criticizes a book published in 1976 by David Goldstein, under the title “Dostoïevski et les Juifs” (Dostoevsky and the Jews).

However, before I address a few arguments developed by Lamblé, one must remember that Dostoevsky is dependent on the prevailing mentality of the Orthodox society of his time and that he adopts many common anti-Jewish stereotypes: taste for money, rootlessness, subservience, etc. But, as Lamblé explains it, by having some of his characters take on these traits, the writer joins his readers in their prejudice so as eventually to better underscore their vanity. We find a similar “strategy” in the French writer Léon Bloy, friend of Jews and slayer of anti-Judaism. In Le Salut vient des Juifs (Salvation comes from the Jews), Bloy, too, highlights several typical clichés of Christian anti-Judaïsm, but it is from this apparent attribution made of the average anti-Semite that he operates a shift and asserts that “the Jewish people stop the History of nations as a dam bars the course of a river, to raise its level”. Following a recent attempt to censor Le Salut vient des Juifs, Alexis Galperin, the great-grandson of Léon Bloy wrote: “The book explicitly adopts the method of St. Thomas, which consists in exhausting every objection, that is, in letting the opponent spit his venom ad nauseam. So, after the first pages, in which Drumont, trampling the holy image of Moses, is lambasted as ‘turlupin sacrilege’, the writer opens the window to the great medieval rush of anti-Jewish violence, plunging, without hiding from it, into an abyss of feelings from which he himself was not exempt. This is what he calls ‘the premises of calculated violence’. In a perfectly planned ‘mise en abyme’(hall of mirrors effect) the crescendo of hatred stops suddenly, abruptly, so that a rise in the glory of Israel can eventually be realized, with an incomparable power”.

Impossible to summarize here all the argumentation of Pierre Lamblé. Let us look, with him, at two characters explicitly identified as Jews by Dostoevsky: Isaiah Fomitch in Notes from the House of the Dead and Lyamshin in Demons. Of course, both characters have somewhat ridiculous, and even rude, personal aspects. But, observes Lamblé, “far from attracting to him the violence of those who surround him, [Fomitch], on the contrary, attracts general sympathy (...) Dostoevsky has taken up the caricatured figure of the Jew, but it is in order to reverse fully the meaning it had...” As for Lyamshin, Lamblé notes that in the group of conspirators who instigated the assassination of Chatov “Lyamshin the Jew is the only one to react humanely to the terror that seizes him in front of the monstrousness of the murder”. And when Dostoevsky writes that, under the influence of this terror, “Lyamshin shouted with a voice that was no longer human but animal”, he suggests that the man expels these “demons” who took possession of the conspirators (and that the novel's title evokes). “While all the others, ethnic Russians, are from now on possessed by the devil, by the ritual murder committed in common, only Lyamshin, the Jew, is able to resist and expel him (...) as he is protected by his religion and by his God, whom the Russians had lost. We find, in this privilege granted by Dostoevsky to his Jewish character, a mark of the utmost respect, and even, on the part of a Christian, a quite extraordinary respect to the Hebrew religion and the sons of Israel”.

 

Notes for The Brothers Karamazov

On the other hand, about the article in the Writer’s Diary entitled “The Jewish Question” Pierre Lamblé refutes once again, in a very clear way, the charge of anti-Semitism. As he wrote in the comment he sent me in 2013, Dostoevsky published work in newspapers only for financial reasons and “he admitted himself that these articles were only commercial products without real meaning”.

Besides that, since his conviction for participating in Petrashevsky’s socialist circle in 1849, the writer was the object of closely scrutiny by imperial censorship, especially in his articles, and was careful to appear loyal to the regime which, as we know, was hardly favorable to the Jews. Finally, as I remarked in “A spot on the beautiful garment”, the article on “The Jewish Question” is immediately followed by another which shows a real sympathy for the Jews and places them in the perspective rather of a “brotherhood”.

Finally, in underlining the lack of seriousness of the criticism developed by David Goldstein, Pierre Lamblé points out that even the author of Dostoïevski et les Juifs is compelled not to withhold the fact that, in several of his writings, Dostoevsky systematically takes to heart “the defense of the Jews in terms that do not contain any ambiguity”. But, notes Lamblé with humor, the only way for Goldstein to explain this attitude, which completely contradicts his thesis, is to describe it as the result of a “momentary aberration”!

Ivan Kramskoi (1837-1887) Insulted Jewish boy

With his extensive knowledge of Dostoevsky's work and his penetrating analysis of the writer’s thought, Lamblé does not hesitate to assert that “there is probably no other Christian author who has brought respect for the Jewish tradition to this level”. And he adds: “Let us compare what Dostoevsky, in his Diary, writes elsewhere about French people (vomiting), Englishmen, Germans, Poles, Catholics and the Pope, and finally Protestants (without speaking of Russians themselves!) and we shall be forced to recognize objectively that, far from mistreating Jews in particular, Dostoevsky shows them a quite amazing benevolence”. Is this not heartening?

Fiodor

(1) Pierre LAMBLÉ, La métaphysique de l’histoire de Dostoïevski. La philosophie de Dostoïevski, tome 2. Essai de Littérature et Philosophie Comparée, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2001.

The Hare With Amber Eyes

About three years ago, deeply moved by Daniel Mendelsohn’s, The Lost, I published a text about it in my blog. The book told, in minute detail, the investigation led by the author to find tracks of parents, citizens of Bolechow, an Ukrenian shtetl, who disappeared in the storm of the Shoah.

And now, as we met recently, one of my cousins of Israel made me present of a book called La Mémoire retrouvée, the French translation of The Hare With Amber Eyes⁽¹⁾. I just finished reading it. In this book too, a man in his forties (Mendelsohn was born in 1960 and de Waal in 1964) undertakes a reconstitution of his Jewish family’s story. But the characters of the two books evolve in very different worlds: the Mendelsohns of Bolechow belonged to the middle class, while de Waal is a descendant of the Ephrussi, a family of very wealthy bankers from Odessa who settled in Paris and in Vienna.

Edmund de Waal

The main thread of the two stories is also very different: starting from some tiny clues, Mendelsohn engages in a thorough search for witnesses and for memories, whereas de Waal, who possesses plenty of elements enabling him to reconstitute the lives of his ancestors, chooses to paint the picture by following the route of a collection of netsuke⁽²⁾ gathered by Charles Ephrussi at the end of the 19th century.

Guided by the route of the netsuke rather than by the chronology, de Waal portrays several of his ancestors. The trip begins in Tokyo, where Ignace – Iggie –, the last possessor of the collection before the author, lives for several years. Then Paris, the elegant district of Parc Monceau, where Charles Ephrussi settled in the 1870s. Charles was a banker, but also an art lover, friend of impressionist painters as Renoir and Manet, or writers like Jules Laforgue or Marcel Proust. He anticipated the fashion of “Japonisme” and gathered the collection of 264 netsuke of which de Waal will follow the track. We also discover the “patriarch”, Charles Joachim Ephrussi, who, in the 1850s, made a fortune with the wheat trade in Odessa. Then, it is Vienna, with the sumptuous Ephrussi Palace, built by Viktor, the great-granduncle of the author. We also learn to know Elizabeth, the grandmother, who married Hendrik de Waal, a Dutch gentleman. Some simple but impressive pages are devoted to the collapse of the Ephrussi family empire, in the late '30s. With the Anschluss and the triumphal entry of Hitler in Vienna, a large number of Jews - among which the Ephrussi - flee Austria. Among those who will stay, almost 70,000 will be killed...

 

Vienna - Ephrussi Palace 

Throughout his route, de Waal brilliantly evokes the atmosphere, the political and cultural background, the fashions, etc., that the Ephrussi experienced in Paris, Vienna or Tokyo. He draws a the same time a portrait without flattery, but not without affection, of these so diverse ancestors, who lived in a privileged circle and who, however, were immersed in their time.

Edmund de Waal is a ceramist. He practices a “minimalist” art. But his approach of the story, even if there is no pathos in it, is anything but minimalist. To provide an overview of the story, which is also History, he accumulates plenty of notations of all kinds, drawn from various sources: public and family archives, objects, newspapers, pictures, etc. The result is quite convincing: a valuable literary work and a precious document on events which marked the History.

The story of the Ephrussi family, if different from that of the Mendelsohns, yet affects us similarly. Because both confront us with the disappearance of an entire world, the sinking of the European Jewry. The emotion comes from the remembrance, revived by an image or an object that evoke a memory with more power than the event itself. No wonder, therefore, if both de Waal and Mendelsohn refer to the same verse of Virgil: Sunt lacrimae rerum (There are tears for things). In Aeneid, the Latin poet tells how Aeneas, who left behind himself the destroyed city of Troy, where he lost friends and relatives, arrives in Carthago. On the walls of a recently built temple, he discovers a fresco depicting scenes from the Trojan War. For the Carthaginians, it is nothing more than a decorative pattern. But Aeneas has experienced it as a tragedy that marked his flesh and his heart; he then bursts into tears and whispers: “Sunt lacrimae rerum – There are tears for things”.

Fiodor

(1) Edmund de WAAL, The Hare With Amber Eyes, London, Random House, 2010.

(2) Tiny carved figures used in the Japanese traditional clothing.

Job, Jeremiah, Yosl…

Is it a coincidence? Four days before Yom Kippur, a colleague passes me a book and asks me to give him my opinion. The story, which takes only about twenty pages of the book, is entitled Yosl Rakover talks to God^(*). It begins with these words: “In one of the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, preserved in a little bottle and concealed amongst heaps of charred stone and human bones, the following testament was found, written in the last hours of the ghetto by a Jew named Yosl Rakover.”

I read these twenty pages breathless, crying, my heart in knots. A dazzling text, a powerful cry, rebellious and peaceful at the same time. An incredible profession of faith in the midst of the worst horrors. Job and Jeremiah together... It is only by reading the essay of Paul Badde, which occupies most of the pages of the book, that I realized that it was fiction. But, as Emmanuel Levinas writes (in the last pages of the book), this text is “true as only fiction can be.”

The author of the story is Zvi Kolitz, a Lithuanian Jew, born in 1919. Emigrated to Palestine at the beginning of World War II, he was active in the Zionist movement and was even an agent of the Irgun. In 1946, he published his story in a Yiddish magazine of Buenos Aires, on the occasion of Yom Kippur. Then settled in New York, Zvi Kolitz died there in 2002.

The ups and downs of this text are amazing. For a long time presented as an authentic testimony, deprived of its real author, Yosl Rakover’s testament circulated around the world, raising many questions, but arousing everywhere a real fascination. Even if the fate of this story and that of the author are exciting, it is perfectly possible to ignore them and receive the text in all its strength and brilliance.

I confine myself here to quote a few fragments. But first, it is necessary to set the scene. It is April 28th, 1943. The Warsaw Ghetto is living its last hours, in a deluge of fire and under a barrage of artillery. Yosl witnessed the death of his wife and his six children, and now his time has come. In the house where he writes, lying on the ground, he is surrounded by the bodies of his comrades, fallen before him: “I look into their faces and it is as if irony had washed over them, peaceful and gently mocking. As if they wanted to say: ‘Have a little patience, you foolish man, another minute or two and everything will become clear to you, too’.” 

The fall of the Warsaw Ghetto

Indeed, he is unable to understand, otherwise than in revolt and anger, the killing madness that surrounds him. “The animals of the forest seem so dear and precious to me that it pains my heart to hear the criminals who are now masters of Europe likened to them. It is not true that there is something of the animal in Hitler. He is — I am utterly convinced of it — a typical child of modern man. Mankind has borne him and raised him and he is the direct, unfeigned expression of mankind's innermost, deepest-hidden urges. In a forest where I was hiding, I met a dog one night, a sick, starving, crazed dog, his tail between his legs. Immediately we felt our common situation (…) He rubbed up against me, buried his head in my lap, and licked my hands. I don't know if I have ever wept the way I wept that night; I wrapped myself around his neck and cried like a child (...) I was ashamed before the dog, for being not a dog but a man.”

But it is God, that he always wanted to serve with dedication – “with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my strength” – to whom Yosl now turns. He wants Him to give reasons. Because, he says, “God has hidden His face. God has hidden His face from the world and delivered mankind over to its own savage urges and instincts (…) In such a circumstance I have, naturally, no expectation of a miracle and do not beg of Him, my Lord, that He should take pity on me. Let Him veil His face in indifference to me as He has veiled it to millions of others of His people…” Yosl knows that God is just, and even that He is “the God of vengeance and our Torah threatens death for the smallest of transgressions”. But the Talmud tells us that “a single death sentence from the High Council in seventy years was enough to make people call ‘You murderers’ after the judges. The God of the other peoples, however, whom they call ‘the God of Love,’ has offered to love every creature created in His image, and yet they have been murdering us without pity in His name day in, day out, for almost two thousand years.”

Then, Yosl stops his thoughts to profess his faith. “I am proud to be a Jew. Because being a Jew is an art. Being a Jew is hard (…) I believe that to be a Jew is to be a fighter, an eternal swimmer against the roiling, evil current of humanity. The Jew is a hero, a martyr, a saint (…) One is born a Jew as one is born an artist. One cannot free oneself of being a Jew. That is God's mark upon us (…) I believe in the God of Israel, even when He has done everything to make me cease to believe in Him. I believe in His laws even when I cannot justify His deeds. My relationship to Him is no longer that of a servant to his master, but of a student to his rabbi. I bow my head before His greatness, but I will not kiss the rod with which He chastises me. I love Him. But I love His Torah more.”

Finally – and these are the most ardent pages – Yosl addresses his God. “And so, my God, before I die, freed from all fear, beyond terror, in a state of absolute inner peace and trust, I will allow myself to call You to account one last time in my life.” He demands to know. “O tell us, what more must happen before You reveal Your face to the world again? (…) Now, more than at any previous stage on our endless road of suffering — we, the tormented, the reviled, the suffocated, the buried alive and burned alive, we, the humiliated, the mocked, the ridiculed, the slaughtered in our millions — now more than ever do we have the right to know: Where are the limits of Your patience?”

Surprisingly, this call changes into intercession and a demand for mercy. “And I wish to say something more to You: You should not pull the rope too tight, because it might, heaven forbid, yet snap. The temptation into which You have led us is so grievous, so unbearably grievous, that You should, You must, forgive those of Your people who in their misery and anger have turned away from You. Forgive those who have turned away from You in their misery, but also those of Your people who have turned away from You for their own comfort (…) Forgive also those who have taken Your name in vain, who have followed other gods, who have become indifferent to You (…) I am saying all this to You in plain words because I believe in You, because I believe in You more than ever before, because I know now that You are my God. For You are not, You cannot be the God of those whose deeds are the most horrific proof of their militant godlessness.”

And the prayer becomes like a blind leap into faith, but incredibly daring and with plenty of extraordinary nobility. “I cannot praise You for the deeds You tolerate. But I bless and praise Your very existence, Your terrible majesty. How mighty it must be if even what is taking place now makes no impression on You! But because You are so great and I so small, I beg You — I warn You — for Your name's sake: Stop crowning Your greatness by veiling Your face from the scourging of the wretched!”

 

Zvi Kolitz

Finally, speechless, stunned, we must listen to the last words of Yosl to his God. He first recalls the story of a Jew who had fled the Spanish Inquisition. On an island where he landed, his wife was struck down by lightning and his child carried of by a wave. Left alone on his rock, he exclaimed: “God of Israel, I have fled to this place so that I may serve You in peace, to follow Your commandments and glorify Your name. You, however, are doing everything to make me cease believing in You. But if You think that You will succeed with these trials in deflecting me from the true path, then I cry to You, my God and the God of my parents, that none of it will help You. You may insult me, You may chastise me, You may take from me the dearest and the best that I have in the world, You may torture me to death — I will always believe in You. I will love You always and forever — even despite You.” And Yosl appropriates these words of fire: “You have done everything to make me lose my faith in You, to make me cease to believe in You. But I die exactly as I have lived, an unshakeable believer in You. Praised be forever the God of the dead, the God of vengeance, of truth and judgment, who will soon unveil His face to the world again and shake its foundations with His almighty voice. Sh'ma Yisroel! Hear, Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one. Into Your hands, O Lord, I commend my soul.”

Once the book was closed, and after recovering  my senses somewhat,  I thought that I had just read the answer to the Grand Inquisitor found in The Brothers Karamazov...

Fiodor

(*) Zvi KOLITZ, Yosl Rakover talks to God, First Vintage International Edition, 2000. Besides the story itself, the book includes an essay by Paul Badde on Zvi Kolitz, a short text – a speech given in April 1955 – by Emmanuel Levinas, entitled Loving the Torah more than God, and another one of Leon Wieseltier. The text of the story is available online http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/kolitz-god.html

Little quiz about the Middle East

Jerusalem 1948. Jews expelled from the Old City by the Arab Legion

More than ever, Israel has a bad reputation in the media. The massive vote at the UN General Assembly (it must be remembered that it includes a wide majority of dictatorial and/or corrupted and/or totalitarian states) has boosted the excitement of the media against the Hebrew State.

Let me say clearly that I am in favour of the “two states” solution, which means an independant Palestinian state, event through important concessions on behalf of Israel. This seems to be the position of Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah party. We can however wonder if it is not merely tactical, while the strategic aim remains the destruction of Israel, an objective that Hamas has no scruple to assert. Recent statements of Khaled Mechaal on this subject are very clear. Moreover, I recommend you strongly the reading of the charter of the Hamas.

To give you, on the political reality of the Middle East, an outlook which is slightly different from that of our "politically correct" media, here is a little quiz.

Questions

1.  At the end of the 19^th century, the most numerous inhabitants in Jerusalem were:

A. Muslims

B. Jews

C. Armenians

2.  Compared to the British Mandatory Palestine, and excluding the “occupied” or “disputed” territories, the the State of Israel spans an area of:

A. 85 %

B. 12 %

C. 20 %

3.  About 3 500 to 10 000 Palestinians (according to various sources) were killed over a period of 10 days, by:

A. The Israelis, during the first “Intifada”

B. The Israelis, during the “Cast lead” operation

C. The Jordanians, in September 1970

4.  800 000 is the number of:

A. Jews expelled from Arab countries after Israel’s founding

B. Palestinian Arab refugees during the war of 1948

C. Syrians who left the Golan in 1967

5.  The Palestinian national claim is the result of:

A. The occupation of the Gaza Strip by Egypt

B. The occupation of the West Bank by Jordan

C. Israel's occupation of the disputed territories since the 1948 war

6.  The PLO (of Yasser Arafat and Mahmud Abbas) has abolished its Charter goal of destroying the State of Israel

A. In 1993 (Oslo)

B. In 1987 (first Intifada)

C. Never

7.  Among the 270 000 Arab inhabitants of East Jerusalem, want to live in a Palestinian State:

A. 30 %

B. 98 %

C. 70 %

8.  Which statement is true ?

A. A Jew is member of the Constitutional Court of the Islamic Republic of Iran

B. A Jew is member of the Egyptian governement

C. An Arab is a judge of the Supreme Court of Israel

Answers

1. B: About “Jerusalem”, the Grand Dictionnaire Larousse du XIXe siècle, published in 1875, quotes: “City of Asiatic Turkey, capital of Judea, chief town of a sanjak of Sidon pachalik. Population can hardly be estimated at more than 18 000 or 20 000 inhabitants: 8 000 Jews, 5 000 Muslims, 3 000 Greeks, 1 500 Latins, 1 000 Armenians, 100 to 200 Syrians and Copts”. Let us add that, in 1899, Jerusalem has 70 000 inhabitants, among which 45 000 Jews.

2. C: The Kingdom of Jordan was created on eighty percent of the territory of the Palestine Mandate allotted to the United Kingdom in 1921. It is thus the Palestinian Arab state, and was recognized as such by Israel untill the Oslo Agreements. This was natural, since more than three quarters of the population of Jordan are of Palestinian origin. And the Arab population in Judea and Samaria were Jordanian until 1967.

3. C: Jordanian Armed Forces during "Black September". Estimates range between 3 500 (Jordanian sources) and 10 000 deaths and more than 110 000 injured (Palestinian sources). The “Cast lead” operation (2008-12-27 to 2009-01-19) led to 1 300 Palestinian victims, half of which were armed men. The first Intifada led to 1 162 Palestinian victims.

4. A: Between 1948 and 1960, it is estimated that more than 800 000 Jews were forced into exile from countries like Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, etc.., where they were sometimes located over two millennia. Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war are estimated at about 700 000, a significant number of which have left their villages at the instigation of the Arab Higher Committee, who promised them to return after the defeat of Israel. The Six Day War has led to the departure of about 100 000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.

5. C: Of course. No protest was expressed against the occupation of the Gaza Strip by Egypt or against the occupation of the West Bank by the Hashemite Kingdom (1948 to 1967).

6. C: Despite verbal assurances given in the framework of the Oslo Agreements in 1993, the goal of the destruction of Israel has never been removed from the Charter of the PLO. As an evidence, this statement of Adli Sadeq, Ambassador of the Palestinian Authority in India, in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, daily newspaper of the PA, on November 26^th 2011: “Hamas, Fatah and the other factions are not waging war against Israel right now for reasons related to balance of power. There are no two Palestinians who disagree over the fact that Israel exists, and recognition of it is restating the obvious, but recognition of its right to exist is something else, different from recognition of its [physical] existence.”

7. A: According to a survey conducted by the American researcher David Pollock (published in the Washington Post in 2011): 30% say they would prefer to be Palestinian citizens in the framework of a two-state solution, while 35% say they would choose Israeli citizenship. (Others gave no answer or refused to answer). 40% said they would consider moving to another neighborhood to become citizens of Israel rather than become Palestinians, and 54% said that if their neighborhood were assigned to Israel, they would not emigrate to Palestine.

8. C: Salim Joubran, an Israeli Arab, is a judge of the Supreme Court of Israel since 2003. We can also mention, among many others, the case of an Israeli Arab Muslim, Jamal Hakroush, Deputy Inspector General in the Israeli police since 2011.

As a conclusion, if we want there to be peace, one day, in this part of the world, we must first clean up the spirits and correct the vocabulary. There is work to be done! ...

Fiodor

A spot on the beautiful garment

Marc Chagall, Isba on fire

One day, you learn, one way or another, that a parent, a relative or a friend is dragging a disgrace, a betrayal, or a shameful passion behind himself... How do you feel ? How will you now reconcile affection, friendship or esteem you have for the person and the awareness of this dark area of himself he tries somehow to conceals?

This is, roughly, what I am feeling at the moment. What is it all about? A few days ago, a correspondent, organizer of a high-quality blog, which dedicates itself mainly to the defense of Israel, sends me a sadden message. She visits my blog and knows my admiration for Dostoevsky. But she writes me: "... I am devastated, I just learned that Fiodor Dostoevsky really did not like the Jews, the Jewish nation and the Jewish religion ..." and she asks me what I think of it. She has, indeed, just discovered a text, entitled The "Jewish Question" which Dostoevsky published in March 1877 in A Writers Diary⁽¹⁾. There, unquestionably, the writer indulges in an all-out attack against those whom he calls "the Israelites". And, according to our criteria of today, this text can, without hesitation, be qualified as anti-Semitic.

At first, acknowledging the friendly message that was sent to me, I answered a little bit too fast: "... This is obviously not the best pages written by Dostoevsky - and this is an understatement. That said, in a few words, and while waiting to address the issue more in depth, I would simply say that he is dependent on the prevailing mentality of the orthodox society of his time. He thus conveys, more or less, the anti-Jewish stereotypes (we still cannot, it seems to me, speak of anti-Semitism) as taste for money, absence of "Russian" roots, subservience, etc." I must say that I read the Writers Diary a dozen years ago. At the time, less sensitized to the issue of anti-Semitism, I read this passage – twenty pages in a volume of 1,500 – without much attention, surprised, maybe embarrassed, but leaving the benefit of good faith to this Fiodor that I considered already, not only as one of the four or five greatest writers of all time, but also as a master in humanity.

But now, I have just read again the twenty pages of The "Jewish Question" and, really, they stick in my throat! Hence this new painful feeling: my admiration for the writer and his novels is not affected, but I must now reckon with this unbearable side of his work – and therefore, to a certain extent, of his person. Dostoevsky, it seems, has fallen into anti-Judaism, or even anti-Semitism (event if the term itself, with its racist meaning, did not appear before 1879, two years after the publication of his text in the Writers Diary).

If it was necessary to look for "extenuating circumstances" in favour of Dostoevsky, various factors could be taken into consideration. First, there is the perspective with which we now consider him, and it is necessarily "anachronistic". There is also the historical context of Russia at the time, with the abolition of serfdom and the social crisis that ensued. Then, the inescapable Slavophilism of Dostoevsky is to be taken into account, and still more, his belief that the Russian people, with its Orthodox tradition, is "théophore" (bearer of God), and that there cannot be any other. On the other hand, the writer leans on events or circumstances which, in themselves, involve Russians as much as Jews, if not even more. But dependent on the anti-Jewish common prejudice, he blames "the Israelites" for all kind of troubles. So, as Aucouturier writes in a note: "Dostoevsky (and he was not the only one) attributes here to the 'Jews' what was the fact of numerous middle-class persons, merchants, and kulaks, Jews or not: the repurchase of the lands of nobles ruined by the emancipation of the farmers, or incapable to adapt themselves to it. Between 1861 and 1881, the ownership of nearly 18 million hectares of land changed"⁽²⁾. As for the impressive ability of the Jewish people to maintain, through thick and thin, its cultural and religious specificity, we see it today as remarkable and as a sign an admirable fidelity. But Dostoevsky, provided with his concepts of political analysis, does not see anything but a "State within a State". Finally, we can say that if the great Fiodor has a sharp tongue against the Jewish people, he is hardly softer towards the major European nations, especially Poland.

But after all, is it necessary to look for excuses and defend the indefensible? We will have to wear the beautiful garment with the spot... However, so much Dostoevsky is detestable when he gets entangled in theories of political nature, as is the case here, so much he seduces and touches us when, leaving the generalizations and ideological extravagances, he dives into the depths of the human heart. There, he finds – in a kind of contradiction of his own opinions – the antidote to his hazy theories or, at least, openness and hope. This is precisely what he does in the chapter immediately following The "Jewish question", entitled The burial of a "citizen of the world". The writer mentions a letter addressed to him by a young Jewish woman, about whom he speaks with great sympathy. She recounts the funeral of an old doctor of German origin. This man, for over half a century, demonstrated extraordinary generosity, especially towards the deprived people and, in particular, to many poor Jews of the town where he exercised. His funeral was the occasion of a real fraternization between Russians and Jews. In this "isolated case ", Dostoevsky sees a paradigm of what can lead to solve what he called The "Jewish question." Here are some lines from the last page of this text: "But say, at this moment, it is almost resolved, the famous 'Jewish question'! The pastor and the rabbi are united in a common love, they almost kissed each other in front of the tomb under the eyes of the Christians and the Jews! No matter if, once back home, each parties return to the old prejudices:drop after drop, the water wears away the stone. And it is such 'citizens of the world’ who overcome the world by uniting it; prejudices will fade a little after each individual case, and eventually vanish altogether. This old man leaves behind him legends, writes Miss L..., Jewish herself, who also wept over the 'good head’ of this friend of men. But the legends are a first step towards action; they are the living memory and the constant reminder of the 'conquerors of the world’ to whom the earth belongs.... "

But read this whole chapter here . It is not very long and it is worth it. You will discover another image of the writer: a Dostoevsky who, beyond its anti-Jewish prejudices, expresses his hope and its faith in the human being.

Fiodor (the other one)

(1) Unfortunately, I could not find any English translation of the text on the web. The French translation can be read free online on Gallica website. The best edition and translation in French is the work of Gustave Aucouturier, collection La Pléiade, Gallimard, 1972. The "Jewish question" is on pages 936-956.

(2) Ibid., p. 1530, note on p. 580.