1En August 2021, one of the greatest figures in contemporary philosophy leaves us, leaving behind an abundant work and a singular, sometimes radical thought. While Jean-Luc Nancy had already taken an interest in the question of anti-Semitism in his essay Excluded the Jew in us, published in 2018, this issue never ceased to concern him throughout his career. In the early 2000s, a dialogue began between the latter and Danielle Cohen-Levinas, a philosopher specializing in Judeo-Germanic studies. This interview, which appears posthumously in 2022, looks back on the origins and particularities of “the hatred of Jews »both ancient and yet still as current.
2If the term “anti-Semitism” only appears at the end of the xixe century, hatred of the Jew has existed for a very long time. It is from this observation — “anti-Semitism is an irreducible, proven civilizational fact” (p. 14) — that the dialogue between J.‑L. Nancy and D. Cohen-Levinas. With great lucidity, the philosopher therefore returns to this “commonplace, a topos, a dox unacknowledged and remained unacknowledged”. (p. 10) However, although universal, this “repetitive, uninterrupted phenomenon” (p. 28) that is anti-Semitism cannot and above all must not become commonplace. We must of course see in the use of the term “banality” (p. 22) an obvious reference to Hannah Arendt and her work on the “banality of evil”.1 ».
3And if anti-Semitism has survived the centuries and is still alive, it is because it is, according to J.‑L. Nancy, “a hydra with many heads. You cut one off, but there’s another to take over.” (p. 14) Indeed, hatred of the Jew has never ceased to exist in different forms. The extermination of the Jews was obviously the most accomplished form of a murderous anti-Semitism which claimed to be scientific. But, for all that, the Holocaust did not make anti-Semitism disappear. This is why J.‑L. Nancy says:
Today, progress seems to have lost all meaning, and the absolute, all dignity. Not only has anti-Semitism re-emerged, as intact and witness to the same fears, but it has taken on the additional appearances developed by the effect of Muslim fundamentalists, on the one hand, and on the other, by the geo-political position of Israel and of a certain Judaic radicalization that one can say is foreign to Judaism. (p.39)
4However, “today, it’s ripe, we can no longer avoid watching. (p. 42) There is indeed an urgent imperative to become aware of the reality of anti-Semitism. As D. Cohen-Levinas also explains, “anti-Semitism is our poison, it is as poisonous as our Christianity, our democracy and our science could have been triumphant”. (p.78)
5To fully understand what anti-Semitism is, “the unthought of European civilisation” (p. 12), J.‑L. Nancy decides to return, with precision and lucidity, to the origins of this profound illness. The affirmation is posed from the outset: only Western civilization would have known the “constant banishment, for centuries, of a people at the same time established in most of the territories, cultures, languages and even nations or citizenships of the area of the given civilization”. (p. 22) This banishment evoked by J.‑L Nancy operates in two ways: the “banning of a so-called “Jewish” identity” but also a “general accreditation of a justification of this banishment”. (p. 23) The assertion is absolute, and its radicality allows the philosopher to discredit possible opposing statements, to face skepticism. Anti-Semitism is therefore “a constituent part of Europe” (p. 24) which is accentuated “in the era when Europe felt that it was losing its own bearings, while becoming a mass society and ‘opinion’ (p. 23) since ‘public opinion has massively adopted the thesis of a Jewish nuisance within society’. (pp. 23‑4)
6Even more than the West, it is the birth of Christianity which is at the origin of the hatred of the Jews. According to J.‑L. Nancy, the very foundation of Christianity is opposed to Jewish thought. While Christianity maintains an ambiguous and dual relationship with Judaism, between reunion and renewal, “it is under this double seal that Christianity comes to place the Jewish call to a God of covenant. (p. 27) This contradiction is then anchored in the essence of Christianity and gives rise to a first form of hatred: was for a long time the least virulent form of anti-Semitism. » (p. 28) Without this « other » that is the Jew, Christianity would not exist. And yet, the latter continues to keep away from this “irreducible other”. (p. 32) The hatred of the Jew can therefore only be attributed, according to J.‑L. Nancy, to the Christian West. This hostility is therefore “Christian in origin, whatever the relations of the Jews with other peoples and/or nations were in antiquity”. (p. 48) He adds, moreover, that “anti-Semitism increased greatly with the Crusades, then with Luther […]. At the heart of it all is self-loathing. (p. 86) Anti-Semitism is therefore a Christian affair which “persists, insists, resists all criticism and all reproaches. He has found new food in the politics of the State of Israel, but it is only an addition to the same old hatred”. (p. 96) J.‑L. Nancy positions herself here at odds with Hannah Arendt, according to whom modern anti-Semitism which leads to genocide is totally different from this hatred of religious origin coming from Christianity: “ [L]anti-Semitism is obviously not the same thing as hatred of Jews of religious origin, inspired in turn by the reciprocal hostility between two antagonistic beliefs2. Indeed, Arendt rejects the idea of an extension of Christian anti-Semitism to modern anti-Semitism. However, to affirm that modern anti-Semitism, both devastating and murderous, and anti-Semitism disguised behind anti-Jewish or anti-Zionist arguments, since the creation of the State of Israel, are only “the addition to the same old “Western hatred” of Christian origin, amounts to forgetting the traces of this hatred during Antiquity, to also ignoring anti-Semitic events in Eastern countries, to turning a blind eye to the seriousness of the remarks made during anti-Zionist demonstrations.
7Should we therefore distinguish what is more akin to anti-Judaism from modern anti-Semitism? Jean‑Luc Nancy quickly returns to this question.
8Distinguishing the notion of anti-Judaism from that of anti-Semitism amounts, according to J.‑L. Nancy, to assert that she can separate the notion of people and religion. However, “the problem is that it is not so easy to separate the two, even when it comes to Jews who have completely left religion” (p. 50), he tells us.
9J.‑L. Nancy also evokes the ambiguity between these two terms. Let us first recall their origin: the word “anti-Semite” appeared during the 1870s, that is to say in “full period of emergence of thoughts of determination of ‘races’ and national-ethnic enclosures, etc. “. (p. 49) It was used for the first time by a German journalist, Wilhelm Marr, to designate hatred of the Jews. The substantive “anti-Semitism” thus appeared at the time when people began to consider that what differentiated Jews and non-Jews came from race (thus from a so-called objective science) and not from religious doctrine. It should also be added that if the term “Semite” designates, initially, “one who belongs to the ethnic and linguistic group of which Sem is considered to be the ancestor3 in reality, “there were few other Semites in Europe.” (p. 49) This word was thus created in order to designate the hatred of the Jews detached from any religious argument. But, Jean‑Luc Nancy does not share this position and affirms that the term is used to “baptize […] what Christian hostility toward the Jews had long been. (p. 50) The term anti-Judaism, on the other hand, is much more recent.
10According to the philosopher, the boundaries between the two terms are porous. If there are still many discussions of critics, theoreticians and historians on the use of the term anti-Judaism and on its possible distinction from anti-Semitism, for J.‑L. Nancy “no scientific argument can change anything in the massive fact of centuries-old hostility to the Jews – first in Europe and then around the Mediterranean, before it spread further afield thanks to the events initiated by the creation of the State of Israel”. (p. 48) In fact, the thinker is very critical of the term “anti-Judaism” which seems to him “to serve as a screen for ‘anti-Semitism'” (p. 50) in that its ambiguity could minimize the seriousness of anti-Semitism . However, J.‑L. Nancy does not prolong the reflection by admitting: “I have no competence to go further in the analyses. (p. 46)
11*
12Let us remember all the same that despite his numerous works on anti-Semitism, it is above all as a philosopher that Jean-Luc Nancy approaches the question. He also briefly evokes the relationship that philosophy maintains with Jewish thought. If he affirms that “philosophy has never considered the Jewish fact from a philosophical point of view” (p. 30), he does not omit to mention some exceptions, such as Levinas and Derrida but also the deep anti-Semitism of Heidegger. If some points can be, as we have seen, called into question by their radicalism and their limits, “the important thing is to succeed in detecting the source of the poison and its virulence”. (p. 77) During this interview, Jean-Luc Nancy was able to analyze the vice of anti-Semitic thought according to which, “in the end, there is no place for the Jews”. (p. 103) Basically, Jew Hatred probes the origins and foundations of anti-Semitism as well as the compatibility between Jewish identity and Western culture. And “something has moved, yes, but the work that would be necessary to overcome anti-Semitism is not the responsibility of Christians alone […]. » (p. 100‑101) These words echo what Sartre affirms when he writes: « [L]anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem: it is our problem4. »
