Déconstruire l’idéologie dominante

Shmuel Trigano

POUR ILLUSTRER NOTRE PROPOS, CI-JOINT UNE MODELISATION DE LA FIN DU JUDAISME EN TERRES D’ISLAM (lien vers pdf)

Le saviez-vous ? 900 000 Juifs ont été exclus ou expulsés des Etats arabo-musulmans entre 1940 et 1970.

L’histoire de la disparition du judaïsme en terres d’islam est la clef d’une mystification politique de grande ampleur qui a fini par gagner toutes les consciences. Elle fonde le récit qui accable la légitimité et la moralité d’Israël en l’accusant d’un pseudo « péché originel ».

La fable

La fable est simpliste : le martyre des Juifs européens sous le nazisme serait la seule justification de l’État d’Israël. Sa « création » par les Nations Unies aurait été une forme de compensation au lendemain de la guerre. Cependant, elle aurait entraîné une autre tragédie, la « Nakba », en dépossédant les Palestiniens de leur propre territoire.

Dans le meilleur des cas, ce récit autorise à tolérer que cet État subsiste pour des causes humanitaires, malgré sa culpabilité congénitale. Cette narration a, de fait, tout pour sembler réaliste. Elle surfe sur le sentiment de culpabilité d’une Europe doublement responsable : de la Shoah et de l’imposition coloniale d’Israël à un monde arabe innocent.

Dans le pire des cas, cette narration ne voit en Israël qu’une puissance colonialiste qui doit disparaître. Ce qui explique l’intérêt d’accuser sans cesse Israël de génocide et de nazisme : sa seule « raison d’être » (la Shoah) est ainsi sapée dans son fondement. La « Nakba » est le pendant de la Shoah.

La synthèse politiquement correcte de ces deux positions extrêmes est trouvée dans la doctrine de l’État bi-national ou du « retour » des « réfugiés » qui implique que les Juifs d’Israël mettent en oeuvre leur propre destruction en disparaissant dans une masse démographique arabo-musulmane.

Les implications

Ce discours manichéen a plusieurs implications symboliques et idéologiques :
- Il délégitime l’État d’Israël et justifie sa destruction
- Il implique que les Juifs ne sont pas un peuple et qu’ils n’ont aucun lien avec la « Palestine »
- Il entraîne que leur constitution en nation est en soi une violence et une mystification
- Il leur interdit la jouissance du droit à l’autodétermination qui est le privilège de tout groupe humain quel qu’il soit.
- Il accuse le sionisme d’avoir mis fin à la « coexistence pacifique » judéo-arabe : il aurait été responsable du départ des Juifs des pays arabo-musulmans
- Il innocente par principe les Palestiniens et les Etats arabo-musulmans
-Il « autochtonise » les « Palestiniens » alors que l’adjectif « palestinien » désignait auparavant les Juifs du Yichouv. La « Palestine » d’aujourd’hui est, en effet, une invention récente qui date des années 1970.

Or, ce récit s’expose à une contradiction majeure
- La majorité de la population israélienne n’est ni originaire d’Europe ni rescapée de la Shoah, et ce, dès les années 1950. Originaire des pays arabo-musulmans, elle est partie prenante de l’histoire politique et humaine de la région.

La mystification

Le destin de cette population est significatif : entre les années 1940 et 1970 elle a été expulsée ou exclue et poussée au départ. 900 000 Juifs d’alors ont dû fuir des pays où ils étaient présents bien avant l’invasion islamique du VII° siècle: 600 000 se sont réinstallés en Israël, le reste, en majorité en France.

- Dans leur grande majorité, ces populations ne sont pas parties volontairement mais sous le coup d’un véritable « statut des Juifs », d’un antisémitisme d’État, souvent systématique, soutenu par un arsenal de lois et de règlements.

- Cet événement massif et considérable, concernant 10 pays, sur une longue période, commençant dans les années 1920 pour certaines régions, est l’objet d’une véritable mystification qui prend la forme du mythe de la symbiose judéo-arabe que toute l’histoire dément, y compris l’âge andalou.

- Ce mythe n’est pas inoffensif : il est la couverture d’un projet de destruction de l’État d’Israël et connaît une diffusion mondiale, dans les pays les plus éloignés de l’arène du conflit. Il retentit sur la condition des Juifs dans les pays occidentaux et sur la réception de l’islam en leur sein.

Il est temps de restaurer le récit historique juif !

Ce n’est pas une question de mémoire, ni de dignité ou de reconnaissance, mais une question politique qui engage la justice.

Car les populations concernées sont toujours vivantes : la plus grande partie des Juifs du monde arabo-musulman constitue la majorité des citoyens israéliens et des Juifs de France.

Ils ont été victimes de violences, de graves spoliations économiques et financières de la part des nouveaux Etats arabes.

L’histoire des 40 dernières années a montré que les passer sous silence se retournait nécessairement contre elles.

Leur présence en Israël n’est pas une cause humanitaire – même si leur expulsion en fit des réfugiés contraints de quitter leur pays et d’abandonner leurs biens. Réfugiés, ils le furent clairement au Yémen, en Irak, en Egypte, en Libye. Ailleurs, ils le furent objectivement si partir précipitamment, sous la menace, en abandonnant ses biens, définit la condition de réfugié.

L’enjeu inavoué

- Les Juifs du monde arabe constituaient une nation dominée, assignée au statut infâme de dhimmi. La seule tolérance qu’ils connurent dans ces pays fut l’époque coloniale où ils échappèrent à cette condition dégradante de parias.
- Il faut voir dans l’immigration de ces populations en Israël le processus d’autodétermination d’une nation dominée du monde arabo-musulman au moment même où le nationalisme arabe conduisait à la création d’Etats qui n’existaient pas auparavant.
- Cette autodétermination s’identifiait naturellement avec le sionisme en quête d’auto-émancipation.
- C’est ainsi que l’existence d’Israël et le sionisme sont perçus dans la perspective du monde arabo-musulman : comme la rébellion d’une nation dominée contre la loi de l’islam et la oumma. C’est la cause unique du conflit israélo-arabe.
- La Palestine n’a jamais été une entité politique, culturelle, identitaire. Il n’y a pas de « Palestine » avant l’instauration du mandat britannique par la Société des Nations, en 1920. Une partie des Palestiniens sont des immigrés du monde arabe, installés là, à la fin du XIX° siècle et au début du XX°, favorisés par la politique ottomane et attirés par la prospérité économique, apportée par les Juifs. Ils sont au plus aussi « palestiniens » que les Juifs. Yasser Arafat comme Edward Saïd étaient des Egyptiens.

C’est un tout autre paysage historique et politique qui transparaît sous la chape de plomb de la mystification.

- L’État d’Israël, reconnu en 1948 par le Conseil de sécurité, est aussi légitime que les États arabes, pure invention post-coloniale. Ils n’existaient pas auparavant. Avant la colonisation européenne, leurs territoires étaient sous le pouvoir colonial - mais musulman - de l’empire ottoman.
- Il n’a pas de dette envers les Palestiniens. Un échange de populations s’est produit à cette époque d’après guerre : en Europe pour environ 18 000 000 de personnes (dont le déplacement vers l’Allemagne de 12 000 000 de ressortissants d’origine allemande, provenant de 5 pays) ; en Asie, pour les 12,5 millions d’Indous et de Pakistanais à la suite de la sécession du Pakistan musulman en 1947-1948. Rappelons le transfert avant-guerre de 1,3 millions de Grecs et de 400 000 Turcs, de 200 000 Bulgares en 1923-1933, et combien d’autres échanges de populations dans le monde entier. Parmi elles, 900.000 Juifs et 600.000 Palestiniens.
- Par contre, la dette arabe est réelle: les biens juifs spoliés sont 500 fois supérieurs à ceux des Palestiniens.
- Les Palestiniens et les États arabes sont les seuls responsables de leur situation :

* Ils ont systématiquement refusé tous les partages de la Palestine mandataire alors que les Juifs l’acceptaient.
* Un Etat palestinien s’est néanmoins déjà créé sur les deux tiers de la Palestine : la Jordanie. 75% de sa population est « palestinienne », même si le pouvoir est aux mains d’une minorité bédouine qui n’hésita pas à massacrer les « réfugiés palestiniens» lors du dramatique « Septembre noir » de 1970 (10 000 morts, 110 000 blessés).
* C’est la « Transjordanie » (créée en 1922 par l’empire britannique) qui a occupé et annexé les territoires de Judée et Samarie et Jérusalem-Est lors d’une guerre de conquête en 1947-1948. Elle devînt alors la « Jordanie » et les territoires occupés, la « Cisjordanie ». Aucun mouvement de libération palestinien ne se leva contre cette occupation, ni contre celle de la bande de Gaza par l’Egypte. La « Palestine » n’était pas encore née.
* Les réfugiés palestiniens ne sont pas innocents : ils étaient partie prenante de l’agression des États arabes contre Israël. Leur départ ou expulsion est directement lié à cette situation.
* Les Juifs des 10 pays arabo-musulmans, n’étaient pas sur le terrain du conflit armé, ni ne constituaient une puissance menaçant les États arabes où ils résidaient.

- Les Etats arabes n’ont pas intégré les réfugiés palestiniens, à l’inverse d’Israël pour ses réfugiés, pour en faire des foyers de guerre permanents.
- Les Palestiniens, y compris les « modérés », refusent toujours aujourd’hui le partage du territoire mandataire restant après la création de la Transjordanie, en refusant à Israël le droit à son caractère national juif, alors qu’ils définissent la Palestine comme arabe et islamique, une terre où, selon leurs documents constitutionnels et leur pratique, il n’y aurait plus aucun juif et où il n’y a déjà quasiment plus de chrétiens.
- L’existence d’Israël pose le problème du droit de vivre en sujets libre et souverains des nations non musulmanes dans l’aire musulmane. L’extermination des Arméniens, d’abord par l’empire ottoman, puis par le nouvel Etat turc a représenté la première répression d’une population dhimmie en quête d’indépendance nationale. Il n’y a quasiment plus de Juifs aujourd’hui dans le monde arabo-islamique et les chrétiens y sont en voie de disparition.

L’enjeu contemporain

Le critère déterminant d’appréciation de la situation d’Israël n’est pas seulement la Shoah des Juifs d’Europe mais celle dont le monde arabo-islamique menace l’Etat d’Israël qui résume l’impasse tragique que le « statut des Juifs », mis en oeuvre lors de la fondation des nouveaux États arabes, y annonçait et que la création de l’État et sa victoire militaire ont suspendue.

Elle plane toujours sur sa tête et la menace nucléaire iranienne lui donne toute sa crédibilité.

Le peuple juif n’est pas une cause humanitaire mais un peuple de l’histoire et il a le droit à la souveraineté sur une terre qui a connu trois Etats juifs et depuis la plus haute antiquité, en un temps où ni le mot arabe, ni le mot islam n’étaient encore connus. La condition des Juifs n’est pas vouée à la marginalité ou à la soumission par on ne sait quelle fatalité.

Ces quelques vérités constituent le B-A BA d’une vision saine et objective de la situation, fondée sur la réalité des faits.
Tels sont les éléments historiques et politiques qui doivent inspirer le discours juif aujourd’hui. Il est temps de reprendre l’initiative morale, symbolique, idéologique du débat et du combat.

Document élaborant le modèle historique de la fin des communautés juives en terres d’islam .

Bibliographie de l’auteur :
La fin du judaïsme en terres d’islam, (livre collectif sous sa direction), Editions Denoël, 2009.
« L’exclusion des Juifs des pays arabes » (livre collectif sous sa direction), Pardès, 28/2000, Editions In Press.
« La mémoire sépharade » (livre collectif sous la direction de Hélène et Shmuel Trigano), Pardès, 34/2003.
Le Monde Sépharade, histoire et civilisation, (livre collectif en 2 tomes sous sa direction), Le Seuil, 2006.

 

Jewish Peoplehood: a Unity of Opposites?*

Shmuel Trigano**

*This paper was presented at the President’s conference “Tomorrow 2009”, Jerusalem.
**Professor of sociology at Paris University, head of the Collège des études juives de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle. http://www.shmuel-trigano.fr/

There is a strange irony to talk about unity of the Jewish people in times of what can be seen realistically as a war of the Jews. But it is critical to analyze the reason of this war in order to understand what is at stake when speaking of unity in relation to the Jewish people.

Two camps
Among the larger part of today lost Jews, two camps confront each other. Their importance is different if you are in diaspora or in Israel. One is the ultra-orthodox trend and the other the post-something/anything movement, post-Zionist, post-modernist, and so on.

The two camps aim at the same target. They question de facto and de jure the existence and the legitimacy of a Jewish people.

The main consequence of such a position is that they are opposed to the will to sovereignty of this people, as it is carried out by the State of Israel.

An Israeli-limited camp
This questioning is passive for the ultra-orthodox and mostly Israel-limited. It expresses itself through a national inertia, a default regarding the common life and a sectarian choice to be a counter society.

In diaspora as in Israeli society these two camps stand aside from the Jewish people, but the phenomenon is much more developed in Israel where exists a real Jewish society.

The Diasporic Pompeian syndrom
On the contrary, for the other camp, this dispute is aggressive and activist. It develops mainly in diaspora and gathers a large part of the Jewish intelligentsia. Its harsh criticism of Israel and Jewish community, its permanent denunciation of other Jewish intellectuals are directed toward global society.

I call that the Pompeian syndrome, when in the Second Temple period a political party asked Romans ( and the consul Pompeius), to intervene in their internal affairs in order to win on its rivals.

It is a nightmare to state the fact that the theoretical impulse of their position comes from sectors of Israeli intelligentsia, academia and medias.

The global background
These two ideological trends are fighting the rest of the Jewish people on behalf of what they think to be Jewish ethics or on behalf their own definition of Judaism as a religion.

This dispute occurs in a political arena where the existence of a Jewish people is demonized and delegimized.

I cannot stop thinking that these two ideologies are the same ones that disarmed the Jews in the decades preceding the Shoa and that they are the more vocal, the more systematic and the more organized in today public arena, in this prodigious period of an existent Jewish sovereign state.

That is to say that the ideological political forces that are the most active today are those who risked the life of the Jews, before the Shoa and the creation of the state.

At stake: the Jews as a people
What is at stake –as we see– is the Jewish condition as a people.

From one side, it is attacked on behalf of a secular spiritualism, from the other side on behalf of a religious sacred, on behalf of an immanent, inworldly principle or of a transcendant, outworldly principle.

A twofold identity
This is an indication that there are two entries into Jewishness: as a people or/and as a creed (will it be secular or religious).

This indication helps us to understand that the Jewish people is twofold: a people and a church.

From one side, a specific people. And not a people of peoples as the Christian Katholikos and the Moslem Oumma.

From the other side, a church, and not a clergy, as the Christian church.

This unique characteristic is pretty well illustrated by the founding narrative of this people: the Sinai revelation is granted to the whole of a people.

Cross relationships
This twofold identity implies that the people does not depend on the state for the principle of its existence.

The people is greater than the nation. That is why it can exist outside the Israeli state (diaspora).

It implies also that religion is not limited to the needs of the people (as pretended Spinoza) but has also a universal scope, significance.

Different expressions
This twofold dimension expresses itself in different ways: Diaspora/Israel, religious/secular, Sefardi/Ashkenazi, people/nation, State/religion.

In the same way, according to the Book of Genesis, humanity which is only one, is basically man and woman.

In quest of unity
It is upon such a joint of these two components that we have to lean in order to think of unity as a unity of opposites.

The new situation created by the existence of a State is that the federative element cannot be exclusively the Book as it was in exile. The State has to be added.

If the Book is the federative element of the church, the State became the federative element of the people.

A challenge
We have to seek for a way to federate the State and the Book.

It is a totally new theological problem for Judaism as a religion.

It is a totally new political problem for Judaism as a people.

*This paper was presented at the President’s conference “Tomorrow 2009”, Jerusalem.
**Professor of sociology at Paris University, head of the Collège des études juives de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle. http://www.shmuel-trigano.fr/

 

The Future of European Jewry*

Prof. Shmuel Trigano

* A lecture at the International Conference « European Jewry: A New Jewish Centre in the Making? »
(Berlin. May 10th – May 12th 2009), organized by the Moses Mendelssohn Centre of European Jewish Studies in cooperation with Centrum Judaicum, Klal Yisrael and Tel Aviv University .

Before asking ourselves if a new Jewish center is appearing in the European Community, there is a need to define the notion itself? What were the characteristics of the Jewish centers which developed in different places of the world through the ages? A comparison between them would show that their constitution depended on a set of previous conditions.

Seven requisits

Seven “requisits” were necessary to make the constitution of a Jewish center possible:
1)A sufficient demographic concentration of Jewish population
2)The appearence of a new power which is not yet consolidated nor institutionalized
3)The need of this power, in its rising phase, for the Jews to help it to organize itself, for two reasons:
a)As a minority, the Jews are a prey to a global hostility and that situation secures a total fidelity that the new power cannot expect from the majority population.
b)As a world network, the Jews have useful connections for this new power throughout the world
4)A Jewish center will appear when a rising new Jewish elite will bring about a top cultural production concerning Judaism or linked to Judaism
5) A Jewish center will appear when it will federate under its umbrella, as Dubnow theorized it, a network of Jewish lesser centers in other countries.
6) The Jewish center will last as long as a new elite of a same (ethnic-religious) origin than the new power elite has not appeared.
7)As soon as this elite will be constituted, the decline of the Jewish center will begin and the Jewish elite will be driven away from its positions.

A strategical approach

These are the various criteria which permit to assess if a new Jewish center is in the making in Europa. Without dismissing such a possibility, I will express my perplexity, not only when I consider the state of European Jewry today (but I won’t do this examination here, it is indeed a secondary element) but especially when I consider the strategical landscape of nowadays Europe. I will take as a basis the presentation of the leaflet presenting our conference.
The idea that Europe is on the way to a “coherent entity” seems to me a pious wish, especially when this coherence is defined in the words of a “political unification”.

The axis of any strategic interpretation of the state of things in the united Europe is the conjunction of two developments

a)The destructuration/deconstruction of the European nation-states and national identities upon which the European international structure was built
b)The coming of an important Arab-Moslem immigration, the religion of which did not go through the process of modernization.

In this background, the Jewish condition underwent a very problematic change of strategic status. It is important to remember its genealogy from the 1950es.

1)The Shoah has been a turning point and the sign of the end of the Emancipation era, that is to say of a status according to which the Jews were recognized as individual and unidentified, anonymous, citizens. The Shoah was the tragic outbreak of the collective and not voluntarist fate of the Jews transcending the frontiers of the European national states (1).

2)A Jewish life has been again possible in this continent (on a voluntary basis in the Free Europe and a de facto imposed basis in the Communist Europe), only according to the lesson (most of the time unconscious) drew from this cataclysmic event. Jewish life was reconstructed on the basis, I won’t say of “communities”, but of communal identities: the French Jewry case is from this viewpoint the most illustrative case of the Jewish condition not in de facto empires like the USSR but in Western nation-states, that is to say in Western Europe.

The element of the Jewish collective destiny has been re-integrated into the emancipated Jewries as a datum of Jewish existence and also as a value (not only a tragedy, except for assimilated Jews re-discovering their Jewishness because of the Shoah).These identities took again on themselves the responsibility for the Jewish people, without abandoning or neglecting nevertheless the citizenry. They necessarily and naturally leaned on the new State of Israel and more largely Zionism which constitute today the only instance of an assumed, positive and constructive collective Jewish destiny, contrasting with Jews’fate in the Shoah. This development was assumed with no problem by Western Europe states so that it found its place without a problem.

The societal change in Europe

This situation totally changed from the beginning of the 1990es (2nd Gulf war 1990-1991). A double development explains it: a societal one and a social one.

The societal change concerns the political structure of Europe. The progress towards the unification of European states weakened the existing framework of the nation states. The national identity they produced has been plunged into a vacuum and confusion. At the same period occurred a huge immigration which stressed the consequential disorientation and loss of the usual points of reference. This double phenomenon had dire consequences for the Jewish communities and for the integration of the immigrants.

Indeed, the framework of the after-war Jewish communal identities has been shaken. Their identity has been built onto the national identities and one of their efforts has been to maintain a symbolical equilibrium: to balance their link with a Jewish people on their loyalty to their nation-state. With the decline of the European nation-states this type of identity has been ruined.

The leaflet of our conference presents the Jewish community as a minority in a landscape defined according to the criterium of ethnic and religious minorities. That is indeed what is at stake. Is the status of minority desiderable for European Jews? I am not sure: they will lose the protection of the democratic citizenship which compensate for their numerical weakness, especially when confronted with another powerful minority. The majority’s choice will be done quickly and easily. Such a possibility has been proved since the beginning of the 2000 years. One of the lessons of those years was that the prevailing ideology of muticulturalism is not a positive factor in the recognition of a Jewish “minority” but, on the contrary, an incentive to anti-Semitism.

Concerning the immigrant populations, the absence of a clear model of integration, because of the decline of the nation states identities, has not helped their integration and perhaps will not permit it totally in the future. We might witness the constitution of an important semi-national Arab-Moslem minority in the new Europe.

Last but not least, if the nation-states have been shaken by the European unification it is not yet clear what sort of state will be this United Europe. I can only see it as a new Empire, but where is the emperor? There were no empire during history without an emperor and a dynasty, a sacro-sanct figure, who, by his charisma, was able to unify a chaos of peoples and languages.

The social change in Europe

These structural changes went hand in hand with the second Gulf war in 1990-1991 and worsened with the burst of the war in Iraq and especially the second intifada.
A virulent anti Americanism burst out in Europe and the second Intifada was globalized on a world wide scale. From now on, the “Arab street” passes through the European cities.

These were favorable circumstances for the Arab-Moslem minority to climb on the European political stage. The abusive criticism of Israel that developed in Europe was a point of agreement between the new minority and European public opinion. It was not only in fact a matter of opinion. There was a real terrorist threat coming from the global Jihad, that the Madrid and London attacks afterwards proved. The Jews felt that the condemnation of Israel and the lenience concerning the antisemitic attacks were a sort of appeasement related to this threat . In this circumstances, they understood that civil society in a number of European countries and at least the European Union had chosen the Arab camp. This choice can be illustrated as much for the medias as for European diplomacy.

The new atmosphere in Europe

The present failure of the immigrant populations’ integration led to a new situation: the European inner problems became spontaneously international and global problems. The antisemitism coming from the Arab-Moslem milieu is not fighted as it ought to be because there are threats on Europe coming from outside. If it is possible to condemn harshly Israel and the Jewish communities, a very cautious discourse is used to protect the Moslem world opinion.An Orwellian language has even been invented not to name the things as they are.

The hate of the Jews became the meeting point between the extreme right, the extreme left and Islamic fundamentalism. Globally the larger part of the Western European elites are anti-zionist, the politically correct term for the new antisemitism. Antizionism cannot define the criticism of the Israeli government’s policies. It concerns the essence itself of the existence of the state of Israel, its legitimacy.
Concretely, in Europe, what we have said of the post WWII development showed that what is at stake with Zionism for European Jewries is the Jewish people identity. To deligitimize the moral right of existence of Israel as a state and as a Jewish state is to undermine the basis of the restoration of a Jewish life in Europe after the Shoa and because of the Shoa.

To summarize, Israel and the Jews appear today in Europe as the main obstacle to the inner peace in Europe. This is confirmed by all the European scale surveys of public opinion.

All these causes explain why the hypothesis of an ascent of a Jewish center in Europe seems to me unlikely. There is no opportunity that the Jews will become the privileged minority that the coming European power will need to impose itself on the remains of the Nation-states powers (in the same way as the new European nation states, according to Hannah Arendt in On Antisemitism, needed in 19th century, a Jewish people to help them to realize their major public projects).

The third symbolical change

The development I tried to outline is not so clear to everyone. The situation is ambivalent. This ambivalence is also one of the characteristics of the new anti-Semitism. The current deligitimization of the State of Israel in European public opinion, indeed, goes hand in hand with the celebration of the “Memory of the Shoa”. This ambivalence explains how the new anti-Semitism can accuse Israel on behalf of this memory.

In order to understand this dialectical ideology it is important to understand the major symbolical change that occurred in Europe during these 20 last years. After a long latency period of psychological and intellectual repression, the memory of the Shoa has been institutionalized and became even state-controlled. A sanctuarization of the memory of the Shoa occured and this new deal constitutes a major symbolical-ideological turning point for European Jews.

If it is possible today to deligitimize the State of Israel on behalf of the Shoa, it is because this sanctuarization-sacralization was only possible at the expense of the main lesson of the Shoa: the assomption of the Jewish destiny as a people’s destiny. This state-controlled memory in Museums, memorials, foundations has untied the so called “universal” victims from their Jewishness and from the exterminated Jewish people. It seems that it was the necessary condition to honour and celebrate them. The celebration of a late Jewish people.

From now on, Jewish existence was identified with the exclusive condition of victim and martyr, till suffocation. The consequence was the depoliticization –sanctuarization of the Jewish people in the European perspective: a dead people, a people of victims but not a sovereign people, not an actor among the actors of human history, that is what the state of Israel incarnates.

The Jewish communities became the repository of the memory of the Shoa so that their concrete life became an excess, a reprehensible abuse. The celebration of a dead people opened the way to the deligitimicization of a living people.

The question which is asked to Europe is to know what type of Israel will it recognize in the Jews. If Zionism was born it was to find a solution for the Jewish people which did not find a place in the modern political order after being excluded for religious reasons under the Ancien Régime. In the Shoah, this people was destructed. After WWII, all the Jewries in Arab-moslem states were expelled or excluded so that there are no remnants of them in those lands.Today when there is a state of Israel which incarnates the Jewish collective destiny, will Europe recognize it as a living and legitimate people or as a dead and celebrated people?

1 - See my book: The democratic Ideal and the Shoah,The Unthought in Political Modernity
(translated by Gila Walker), SUNY Press, 2009. http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61810

Shmuel Trigano is professor at Paris-Nanterre University (Sociology of Politics and Religion), founder-director of the Collège des Études Juives de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle (http://www.aiu.org/), founder-director of two journals, Pardès(www.inpress.fr), a European journal of Jewish Culture, and Controverses, a journal of ideas (http://www.controverses.fr). He published 18 books (http://www.shmuel-trigano.fr/). One of his book The democratic Ideal and the Shoah,The Unthought in Political Modernity (translated by Gila Walker) was published in English, SUNY Press, 2009 and is announced this fall in its Hebrew translation (Avner Lahav) at Ben Gurion Uinversity Press .Philosophy of the Law, the beginnings of politics in the Torah will be published soon by Shalem Press, in English.

* A lecture at the International Conference « European Jewry: A New Jewish Centre in the Making? »
(Berlin. May 10th – May 12th 2009), organized by the Moses Mendelssohn Centre of European Jewish Studies in cooperation with Centrum Judaicum, Klal Yisrael and Tel Aviv University .