A Room With a View

By LUCETTE VALENSI

First God.

God let me down on a bright summer night back in my native Tunisia. I have to admit that he did not do it of his own will. It was in response to a demand I made on that fateful night. I remember clearly the square of dark blue sky framed in my room’s window, scintillating with the signals of sparkling stars, I lying in bed and proposing a last deal. Too many things did not make sense. Too many were hurting. Why did God allow this to happen? What could be the rationality of a world full of misery and cruelty, injustice and hatred and contempt, all these things that we knew were not right. Just not right. How were we to understand the outrageous facts of Nazism and the Holocaust, of colonialism and political oppression, of colonialism and economic exploitation? All these phenomena that called into question moral categories we were supposed to base on religious principles. I took a deep breath and asked God directly to send me a sign. And I fell asleep. When I woke up the next morning, there was no message.

God had left the stage, so God was dismissed from my personal life. I don’t remember being upset or disappointed or subdued by his lack of response. I don’t remember it as a moment of religious crisis. I have the impression that I readily accepted God’s absence. I stopped having doubts. I kept having unresolved questions. I would have to seek answers by myself. Fine.

Looking back on this episode of my adolescent past, I am a bit shocked (and quite embarrassed) by the insolence, the arrogance, of the teenager I was. But that is the way it happened. I must have realized then that the business of my life was my business. That God belonged to a different and separate sphere.

I know it was part of growing up; of leaving behind the privilege and innocence of childhood; of getting my act together without counting entirely on my parents. But since we are concerned with the religious and Jewish dimension of the process, let us go back to it.

God deserted me; then I deserted Judaism.

We were passing through a process of secularization of our lives, more or less accelerated for the different segments of the population: Jews and Muslims, city-dwellers in the capital city of Tunis and those in provincial towns. Within French colonial North Africa, there was a general movement among Jews to gradually abandon the practices of previous generations. Our grandmothers stopped covering their hair, our mothers turned on the light on Shabbat, our parents ate non-kosher food outside the house and when abroad. Our grandparents had respected the prohibition against representing the human figure to the point of banning dolls, but we were allowed such idols and enjoyed playing with them. Thus, distancing ourselves further from religious practices was not entirely subversive. Nor was it socially disruptive. It did not mean cutting oneself off from family or milieu. It was done and perceived as a natural movement out of our cultural-intellectual ghetto.

My rejection of Jewish rules meant that I started eating non-kosher food, ignored Shabbat, didn’t fast on Yom Kippur, had no religious ceremony when I got married, no mezuzah on my doorpost, no circumcision or bar mitzvah for my son, no Jewish education for either of my children. Such traditions were meaningless to me.

We felt enticed by more exciting developments. Wide gates were being opened, raising new questions, but also showing broad avenues. There was the formidable seduction of Western secular culture, past and present, and we were exposed to it at school and on the radio, in literary magazines and theatre plays. There was, simultaneously, the internalization of French colonial contempt for anything native, including our own language and traditions, as if they were designed to put a stigma on us, to prepare the ground for antisemitism.

There was the trust in a political culture—French republican culture—and an attraction to the history of Jewish emancipation in France. The former promised the acceptance of Jews into the larger society; a separation of church and state; a social and cultural integration that would make you feel at home in the larger society, and put you in the company of the most distinguished artists, thinkers, and philosophers of French history, objects of secular pride. From my point of view, and for my generation, what was taking place was acculturation, the acquisition of knowledge, expertise, and culture.

But Jewishness remained.

In spite of all these changes, I was still Jewish. What was gone was God—faith in God, fear in God, Jewish observance. Not Jewishness: God was out of my life, he was outside History with a capital H. But Jewishness remained.

Not that I had received a Jewish education—not in any case in a formal sense. As a girl, I was not trained to read Hebrew, did not have to be prepared for the bar mitzvah. Having no brother, I did not even observe the coming of the rabbi to our home to teach him and prepare him for the celebration. I did not hover over his shoulder to learn surreptitiously what he might have learnt.

Jewishness remained because I grew up and lived in a mostly Jewish environment, a Jewish neighborhood in the winter, in Tunis, and a Jewish beach resort in the summer. How did I feel about the Jews around me? Did I love them? Not really; most of the time I disliked their (our) gregariousness; I felt uneasy with their social climbing, their constant concern with wealth. Our world seemed small and full of divisions, competition. One was tempted to tell everyone: Hey! Could we calm down and be less noisy? Could we stop and think for a minute or two?

I didn’t love them all, yet I enjoyed the feeling of closeness—of security and protection—that accompanied life in a segregated community. Summers, for instance, were spent in an entirely Jewish resort town on the Mediterranean. We knew everybody; every summer was like the previous and next in its planning, rituals, and activities, its smells and sounds. There were no goyim in sight, except for the Sicilian fishermen who brought their catch every evening (in a separate but close-by town), and a few Muslim workers and shopkeepers who occupied a specific niche in the local division of labor. The French were elsewhere, in fancier resorts; they went back to France in the summer. We did not have to measure up to them, or fear their judgment, or deal with their sense of superiority. We stayed among ourselves. There was a kind of culinary euphoria, with the main street as a permanent display of fresh food, cheap restaurants, ice cream parlors, merchants of French fries and hot buns, peddlers selling sunflowers and peanuts, other peddlers with their baskets of fresh sandwiches. There was the pleasure of playing volleyball or soccer on the beach, the quiet, intense pleasure of lying down on hot sand, then swimming just enough to get cool again and returning to the burning sand and sun. There was the excitement of dancing every afternoon to the sound of jazz music and French singing, the exhilaration of evening marriage or bar mitzvah celebrations, to the sound of Raoul Journo’s orchestra and our women’s ululations. There was the thrill of dating your first boyfriend (or girlfriend).

Here I must step back and ask myself: What was Jewish about all of this? Were we socially Jewish because we lived among Jews? Is that all there was to it? No, I should also tell you about Shabbat (clean, well ironed clothes, silence on the streets, visits of women to other women, the same menu on every table). I should tell you about Friday evenings, with the same menu for every family, the same fragrances, the same ingredients, the only difference being more or less meat in the broth. And Friday afternoons, with gallons of water being warmed up for each of us to wash our hair and take a bath-shower in the bathroom we all had to share. And Friday mornings, with feverish preparation in the kitchen, and we children being sent to the baker’s oven with our trays of homemade bread and pastries, coming back home melting from the warmth of the trays and the heat of the sun at noon. I should also tell you about Thursday mornings, with high fever at the butcher’s shop and on the market. I should tell you about the incessant activity of our mothers and grandmothers, always busy getting ready for the next ritual meal. Our early involvement in all these preparations turned us into would-be Jewish wives and mothers. Jewish time, Jewish rhythm, Jewish space, Jewish neighbors, friends or enemies: what else do you want?

Let me put it this way: we were full-time Jewish in the summers, until the high holidays, and part-time Jews the rest of the year. Is that not enough?

To remain a Jew without a Jewish community.

Then the live connection to the past vanished, followed by the daily contact with other Jews. What was happening? Nationalism was triumphing over the colonial regime, and leading the country toward political independence. Nationalism, even with a secularist discourse, was incompatible with remaining Jewish. Indeed, it made it impossible to be both Jewish and a citizen (that is, an individual) with full rights. It made you more Jewish than you felt, and at the same time, an outsider.

Jewishness was not only what I mentioned earlier. It was also the simple fact of being born Jewish—and it came with unforeseen (but undeniable) implications. Let me try to explain: most Jews were apolitical. Historically, they had accommodated themselves to whatever regime they were subject to, as long as they enjoyed some degree of safety and stability. With the coming of the French in North Africa in the 19th century, even those who did not become politically active (or politically conscious) trusted the universalistic, egalitarian principles of French republicanism. Of course, such principles were not really enforced in the colonial situation, but they created an attractive political horizon. As for those of us who became politically active, we could oppose colonialism, but we had no part in Tunisian nationalism. Mainstream nationalist movements—in Tunisia, but even more so in Algeria and Morocco—were Islamic and Arab in their constituency, in their discourse, in their relationship to other pan-Arab movements. Even though the Tunisian leadership of the national movement was more secular than any other; even if their political models were Western; even if they had direct connections to the French political class, they belonged to the Muslim majority and they addressed their Muslim compatriots.

When nationalism succeeded in ending the colonial regime, we were faced with a number of difficulties. To mention just a few:

A fear of political instability, institutional turmoil, unpredictable developments in the process of nationbuilding. Jews were slowly excluded from the benefits of independence. At first, there seemed to be fair access to the positions for which they were qualified. Then followed discrimination, with no available substitutes.

Arabization of education and administration. We had abandoned spoken Arabic—the language of our ancestors—and had never mastered written Arabic, because Jews wrote exclusively in Hebrew. We had invested heavily in French education. Now we were asked to acquire a language that would put us at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the Muslims.

Little by little, the Jewish population melted away. All those people with whom I thought I had little to share were leaving. I stayed a few more years than others, hoping I could take part in the building of the new state and the development of its society. But I remained an outsider, a pariah—a bourgeois pariah, with material and social advantages—but a pariah all the same.

It was this divorce from the Muslim majority that created a fundamental discontinuity in our condition as Jews, not becoming agnostic, not becoming non-observant.

And then, there was another twist in my life.

As a historian and scholar, I became a specialist of yet another civilization: Islam.

What did Jews do when they went into exile? First, they adjusted to their new environment—and this is what we did. Second, they carried the Bible with them as a portable country. The book became a substitute for the lost territory. For Tunisian Jews, leaving North Africa was like going into exile: not a pleasant move. Indeed, it evoked a deep sense of loss and dispossession. Besides packing our material and immaterial belongings, what could we take with us?

As a substitute for the lost country, I did not carry a book; I wrote some. As a scholar and historian, I became a specialist of the society and civilization I was brought into, but which had been suppressed from the French curriculum: the Islamic-Arab civilization. I reclaimed this part of our North African legacy, and I wrote on the history of North Africa, on Tunisian peasants, etc.

After this Grand Tour—from the Jewish tradition to Western and French culture, then to the study of Islam—there came a realization. Not all at once; not in a sudden, clear vision; but rather, progressively.

The realization was of the Christian-ness of Western culture. Jesus was everywhere: daily life, city planning, art—even inside of me, since I had internalized the values of love, compassion, and what have you. The most secular societies of the West are impregnated with Christianity. I don’t resent the Christian foundations of Western culture—indeed, I would be sorry if they did not exist: think of our museums without religious art, think of France or Italy without Romanesque and gothic monuments. But I do feel a form of resentment against, or more mildly, a kind of puzzlement towards,some eminent intellectuals of Jewish background who wholeheartedly entered upon the path of emancipation via assimilation and entirely obliterated the Jewish religious and cultural tradition of their forefathers. Mysurprise and my puzzlement turned into a critique of what I considered a blind spot in their work. Assimilation was not, as Hannah Arendt had it, a form of “Jewish suicide.” It was a form of abdication.

Take someone like Marc Bloch, a major historian of the 20th century, maybe the major historian. A grandson of a famous rabbi, he was himself a medievalist, and became the historian of the most Christian moment of Western Europe. The books he wrote in the 1930’s and 1940’s, before he joined the French resistance and was shot by the Germans, are still classics, and remain required reading for every professional historian. Thus, it was a Jewish scholar who taught people the many aspects of a fundamentally Christian society.

But Bloch was not alone: Jewish scholars had played a prominent role in the emergence of sociology (Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss), psychoanalysis (Freud), and art history (Mayer Shapiro, Irvin Panofski, andAby Warburg). They were the founders of major schools in all these disciplines. But they became, and remained, blind to the Jewish dimension of Western culture and tradition, as well as the Jewish presence in Western society and history. They were not the last to do so. But of the generation of scholars who survived the war (Arendt or Momigliano among them), many did confront their Jewishness, along with the issue of the Jewish presence in the world they studied, at some point in their career.

As far as I was concerned, having entered French culture, having been included in Western culture, both apparently secular, I had indeed entered a Christian world. “Secularization and even secular learning became identified exclusively with non-Jewish culture,” Hannah Arendt writes in “The Pariah as Rebel.” I could not agree more.

Now here is where the challenge emerges. Jews in the old days, and in my old country, lived with few rights and minimal means, but they managed to live as Jews. They succeeded in sustaining and transmitting a Jewish identity and tradition. Without the support of an external state, without a strong, centralized, institutional framework, they maintained a living tradition. And they achieved such results not because of antisemitism, and not because they were outcast (or at least, not only because of these conditions).

Here is the challenge: with the resources we have at our disposal, would we not, should we not, maintain and transmit our Jewish traditions? Is the Jewish heritage to be left to the rabbis, to the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox? Should we not take part in a process of secularization of our own heritage?

Secular Judaism, in the present context, should be seen as twofold. One of its goals should be to resist domination by the other religious traditions. The other goal should be a shift from openness to greater openness. This can take the form of a resistance to what I experienced as a logocentric tradition, which established a false continuity from the Greek to the Roman, then to Western Christian civilization, the Renaissance, and European Enlightenment, excluding the other contributions of the human spirit.

Secular Judaism presents an inexhaustible field of study: history, Biblical studies, literary criticism, philosophy; stories, parables, and characters to nourish literary or artistic imagination—an inexhaustible fund of historical experiences that deserve to be known and understood. 

We are the recipients and heirs of this experience. To claim and recover a legacy in order to use it; to expand it; to make it available for other people, Jewish or not: that is our goal, and our project, as secular Jews.

This essay is reprinted with permission from Contemplate: The International Journal of Cultural Jewish Thought (Center for Cultural Judaism, 2005-2006). For further reading please visit http://culturaljudaism.org/ccj/contemplate