That Perelman was a Jew, born in Poland, who faced antisemitism and the Nazis, plays no role in most scholarly writings on Perelmanâs theory of argumentation or in appropriations of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tytecaâs New Rhetoric Project.1 However, Perelmanâs intentions for his scholarship are made clear in the penultimate sentence of âDe lâarbitraire dans la connaissanceâ. The âmost immediate practical consequenceâ of his writings, Perelman concludes this article, âis to seek tolerance between groups ⦠by means of value judgmentsâ.2 Perelmanâs status as a Jew in prewar Belgium explains why he sought this practical consequence, which offered an answer to the âJewish questionâ.
Perelman had become a naturalized Belgian citizen in 1936, a privilege few Jews at that time had, and he and his family had received a relatively warm reception from non-Jewish Belgians. The Université libre de Bruxelles, and especially his mentors there, Eugène Dupréel and Marcel Barzin, recognized his brilliance and provided him significant support.3 In the mid-1930s, Perelman was simultaneously working on his dissertation on Gottlob Frege and publishing articles in La Tribune juive. The young Perelman was enacting the doctrine of double fidélité as a Jew faithful to both Belgium and Judaism.4
In his published work, Perelman does not provide a definition of double fidélité. For this, we must turn to his correspondence. In his homage to Perelman given 8 February 1984, the Viscount and former Prime Minister of Belgium, Gaston Eyskens, recounts how Perelman had described his idea of double fidelity in a letter he had written to Eyskens only several days before his death. As Eyskens recounts, Perelman wrote that double fidelity had imposed upon him a double duty: towards Belgium, which had so generously welcomed him and afforded him the possibility of an intellectual development in an ambiance of freedom and tolerance, and towards Israel, where he had his roots, and which had provided him the foundation of his morality.5 Professor Willy Bok, who cites Perelmanâs definition expressed in this same letter to Eyskens, will later compare him to Emmanuel Levinas.6
Perelman lived through the Holocaust, the formation of Israel, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His thinking on the Jewish question, assimilation, and double fidélité evolves, as Bolduc has demonstrated.7 And yet, Perelman, as a secular Jew, maintained throughout his life a stable commitment to Belgium and to Zionism both. This commitment is marked by a dissociation of the idea of Judaism, as Perelman separates the religious aspects of Judaism from the secular. As early as 1932, Perelman suggests that Theodore Herzlâs idea of Zionism was uniquely, solely national, in which religious questions had no role to play, whence Jean-Philippe Schreiberâs description of Perelmanâs view of Judaism as one of duality, marked by opposing tendencies: that of the religious versus the national.8 Similarly, in 1958, Perelmanâs answer to Ben Gurionâs query about how to determine Jewish identity emphasized a similar separation of the national from the religious.9 Perelmanâs conception of Judaism was thus that of a hybrid social group, divided by the imperatives of nation versus religion. Willy Bok views Perelmanâs 1932 description of certain Jews, atheistic but nonetheless profoundly attached to the Jewish social group, as emblematic of Perelmanâs lifelong commitment to Judaism.10
Even as a âpolitical Zionistâ, Perelman chose to remain in Belgium after the war, working in support of Israel: through the World Zionist Organization (Perelman also served as president of its Action Committee); Keren Hayessod, which gathered funds for Israel, of which Perelman served as president and member of the central committee; with Fela, the Action Committee for Israel [Comité dâAction pour Israël]; and the Belgian Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem [Amis Belges de lâUniversité Hébraique de Jérusalem], of which Perelman was one of the founders.11 However, even as a Zionist, Perelman resisted the Zionist federation and Zionist political parties in the diaspora.12 He was opposed, for example, to a âZionizationâ of the Holocaust, which saw the state of Israel as the clearest response to antisemitism.13 In an interview following the Yom Kippur War (1973), Perelman even described Zionism as an obstacle for aid to Israel.14
Perelman remained throughout his life most active in Jewish associations in Belgium: academic (including the Martin Buber Institute of Jewish Studies [Institut Universitaire dâétudes du Judaisme Martin Buber] at the Université libre de Bruxelles, of which he was president in 1972, and the National Center of Jewish Advanced Studies [Centre National des Hautes Etudes Juives], of which he was a member of the board of directors), as well as social and cultural (including the Center of Jewish Social Work [Centrale dâÅuvres sociales juives]; Menorah, which promoted Jewish culture in the diaspora and of which he was founder; and Friends of Jewish Youth [Les Amis de la Jeunesse Juive], serving as its president between 1959â1963).
Perelmanâs work on behalf of Belgian Jews extended internationally, and he served as the Belgian representative to the European Permanent Conference of Jewish Community Services [Conférence permanente de Services communautaires juifs dâEurope]. Perelman was also very active in preserving the memory of the Jewish Resistance in Belgium as an active member of the Association of the Committee for the Defense of Jews [Amicale du Comité de Défense des Juifs] and of a committee bearing homage to the actions of Belgian Jews particularly, but not only, during the war [Comité dâHommage des Juifs de Belgique]; this committee also documents Perelmanâs Zionist activities in Belgium between 1963â1977.
When Perelman died in 1984, it was his 1935 âRéflexions sur lâassimilationâ that was republished as an illustration of his intellectual engagement with Judaism; this article also formed the basis of the eulogy given of Perelman by Professor Willy Bok, director of the National Center of Jewish Studies in Brussels.15 âRéflexions sur lâassimilationâ lays the cornerstone for Perelmanâs answer to the Jewish question and the problem of assimilation, issues about which he had been reading and researching in 1935â1936, and more intensively in 1939.16 Here, Perelman identifies two forms of assimilation: the first using a forced universalism to erase ethnic or group identity; the second allowing membership in a cosmopolitan humanity to coexist with membership in more local, ethnically rooted social groups. Perelman makes a threefold plea: that Belgian Jews should be true to and celebrate their Jewish heritage; that they should not submit to a doctrine of assimilation demanding an obliteration of their Jewish identity; that it is possible to be faithful to the Belgian nation and to Judaismâin short, a double fidélité, which is not explicitly identified as such.17
Perelmanâs style in âRéflexions sur lâassimilationâ is particularly emotive, a rarity in his writing, attesting to the passion with which he approaches the subject. The sentence structure, particularly in the fourth and sixth paragraphs, is succinct to the point of being jarring, and as such, manifests the urgency of the situation. His use of the infinitive form of the verb to begin nearly every sentence in the fourth, sixth, and seventh paragraphs, which we have rendered here as participles, generalizes the dilemma experienced by all European Jews at the time, regardless of their social class or religious belief. Although he uses the impersonal on [one] throughout (except for the first sentence, which recalls the detached language he uses most frequently in his writings), we have chosen to use the second person throughout as a way of illustrating just how this article makes a personal appealâin a Jewish periodicalâfor a Jewish-inflected assimilation, and for Jews to be proud of and actively engaged in upholding specifically Jewish values.
Whereas âRéflexions sur lâassimilationâ portrays the chilling dilemma of Jews living in the increasingly antisemitic climate of the 1930s, his 1946 âThe Jewish Questionâ is a lengthy academic discussion of Jewish history and assimilation beginning with the Israelites in the seventh century BCE and which concludes in the present of Perelmanâs writing.18 Published in the journal Synthèse, founded in 1900 by Henri Berr and well-known for its interdisciplinary bridging of history, philosophy, and sociology, âThe Jewish Questionâ follows a sociological and historical approach to present a diachronic study of Jewish people.
Perelman had already taken up the question of the scholarship of the Jewish question much earlier, in his âUne conception sociologique de la question juiveâ, published in La Tribune juive in July 1935, five months before âRéflexions sur lâassimilationâ. âUne conception sociologiqueâ is a critical response to Fritz Bernsteinâs 1935 Over Joodsche Problematiek, a work on which Perelman had taken notes between May 1935 and April 1936.19 As Perelman indicates, Bernstein proposes an approach informed by social psychology. âUne conception sociologiqueâ begins by explicitly unveiling how antisemitism compels Jews to wrangle with the Jewish question.20 Perelman sketches out Bernsteinâs theory of group competition as the basis of antisemitism: antisemitism is the persecution of the Jews because they form a minority group, an experience that is never-ending because Jews are, no matter where they live, foreigners, strangers. Perelmanâs response to this particular point is indicative of how he formulates the notion of double fidelity: he responds by insisting that Jews are legally citizens to the same extent of any other citizen.21 As much as Perelman finds Bernsteinâs work enlightening, he nevertheless takes issue with Bernsteinâs inductive method, which he considers too abstract, and concludes by calling for a study of the real experience of antisemitism, country by country. Perelmanâs 1935 âUne conception sociologiqueâ thus sets the ground for his 1946 article on the Jewish question.
The Jewish question remained at the forefront of his intellectual reflection in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as Perelman was working on his book-length study of justice and simultaneously participating in the Jewish Resistance (Perelman helped found the Committee for the Defense of Jews (CDJ) in July 1942 in his home, and served as the committeeâs co-chair). In the early summer of 1939, Perelman took notes on several important works on the history of the Jewish people and Judaism written in both German and French (here, presented in the order in which Perelman took notes): Alfred Loisyâs La religion dâIsraël (1901); Aldophe Lodsâs Israël, Des origines au milieu du VIIIe siècle (1930) and Les prophètes dâIsraël et les débuts du judaïsme (1935); Rudolph Kittelâs Geschichte des Volk. Israël (1909); Gustav Hölscherâs Geschichte der israelitischen und jüdischen Religion (1922); and Antonin Causseâs Du groupe ethnique à la communauté religieuse. Le problème sociologique de la religion dâIsraël (1937).22
âThe Jewish Questionâ is notable for the extensive attention it pays to the origins and evolution of antisemitism, especially from the late nineteenth century, and to the Zionist current of thought which proposed a Jewish homeland as a response. It is especially detailed in its description of antisemitism as political propaganda in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in its portrayal of the waves of Jewish emigration from 1882 onward, in its account of the English policies that rendered emigration to Palestine possible in 1917 but nearly impossible after 1939, and finally, in its depiction of the tragic situation in particular of Polish Jews at the end of World War II.
Although a frequent speaker at the Cercle Universitaire Juif, the Union Sioniste, and the Foyer Israélite, Perelman was not considered an expert on the Jewish question before the war.23 And in fact, âThe Jewish Questionâ may be considered as problematic for two reasons. First, the vision he presents of the origins of antisemitism in the competition between groups ignores the deep-rooted and racial nature of antisemitism. Schreiber believes that the young Perelman may not have read the German economist and sociologist Werner Sombartâs chilling warning, made in 1911, that Jews should not consider the Jewish question as simply political.24 And second, modern-day readers of âThe Jewish Questionâ may find Perelmanâs portrayal of interwar Palestine as a âprofoundly backward countryâ in which the land was âneglected or cultivated in the most primitive waysâ, given the Israeli-Palestinian situation at present, deeply disturbing. The Palestinian Arabs were displaced by European Jews, creating a tragedy for 800,000 refugees.25
âThe Jewish Questionâ is nonetheless a particularly key article in the NRP, a witness to how Perelman, a secular Jew, grappled intellectually with both the dangers of Jewish assimilation and annihilation. Perelman would later solve his own Jewish questionâthe dilemma of being equally Belgian and Jewishâby means of the concept of double fidelity. However, underlying the seeming detachment of expression of âThe Jewish Questionâ lies Perelmanâs very real and personal experience of antisemitism: having witnessed firsthand the ghetto benches while studying at the University of Warsaw in 1936 and being forced to resign from his position at the ULB in late 1940.26 During the war, Perelman was also arrested and then released by the German police in 1942, and spent a year in hiding, from August 1943 to the liberation of Belgium in August 1944, first in Brussels, and then in Malines [known in Flemish as Mechelen].27 Perelman was also present at the liberation of the camp of Malines, 4 September 1944.28
The final words suspend the academic tenor of the rest of the article, and place before the reader a harrowing scene of despairing Jews, survivors of the camps, trying to reach Palestine in small boats and hunted by the British Royal Navy. The elliptical ending intends to stress the countless number of these small boats, evoking a visual scene in a rhetoric worthy of Ciceroâs speeches. Moreover, it also gestures at Perelmanâs own engagement in the Aliyah Bet movement: in July 1946, Perelman and his wife Fela organized a boat for the immigration of Jews to Palestine, which was illegal at the time.29
The poignancy of Perelmanâs passionate conclusion in âThe Jewish Questionâ may be understood when read through the lens of Felaâs writings. In her collection of short stories entitled Dans le ventre de la baleine [In the Belly of the Whale], published in 1947, she depicts the plight of Belgian Jews during the Occupation.30 Tracked by the Gestapo, and facing poverty and hunger, her characters dream of Palestine as a place of justice and common purpose (see, for example, the short story, âIl est difficile dâêtre un casâ 27), and even as an earthly paradise, where, unlike in Belgium, there is abundant sun, rain only when desired, and orchards of orange trees (âComment un village wallon devient sionisteâ 151â153).31
The style of the conclusion of the 1946 âThe Jewish Questionâ points the attentive reader back to Perelmanâs 1935 articles on the Jewish question and assimilation and as a result, allows us to better understand, under the abstract and academic tenor of most of his writing, the very real imperatives underlying Perelmanâs scholarship.
Translation and Commentary
Chaïm Perelman, âRéflexions sur lâassimilationâ. La Tribune juive 12 (31 July 1935) 51â52
We distinguish several types of assimilation, which are essentially different in their motivation and aim.
You may wish to assimilate because of others and also for yourself. But first and foremost, because of others.
You may wish to please others; you may also wish to escape them.
Pleasing others and, to this end, being as others wish you to be. Changing, because what you are is unpleasant. Trying to achieve the ideal that others form of you, internalizing that ideal. Unfortunately, others will modify what they hold as ideal; furthermore, there are different kinds of people, and each person will create a different ideal for you to meet. Being malleable, polymorphous. Being everything and nothing. And never assimilating: aspiring only to realize what is unrealizable. In fact, assimilating means being much more powerful than Descartesâ God, whose will [volonté] was actualized instantly, because it means that you must simultaneously actualize several wills, which are frequently in contradiction. You must also take into account the person who will at the same time reproach you for being too flexible.
And in the end, you will be obliged to abandon your fantasy of assimilation when you are askedâso as not to be unpleasantânot so much to be one person or another, but rather to no longer to exist at all, disappearing in order to please.
Assimilating because of others in order to escape them. Not being distinctive, so as not to stand out. Being anonymous in the surrounding crowd. Losing your individuality to be become a member of a group, and to blend into it. Wanting to unite groups around you, so as not to be exposed to conflicts. Being a follower of any doctrine, of any ideal which allows you to disappear, in order to disappear. Living incognito and, if this is impossible, showing a false passport. Eternally hunted, trembling at the sound of your own name. And, finally, being discovered, accused of treason, of using false papers. Being vomited out like an insidious poison, yes poison, because you are insidious. Must a decent, honest man hide himself so much?
You assimilate in order to live a better life: by leaving behind or by accentuating oneâs personality; by abandoning or by enhancing what you have that is specifically Jewish.
The first possibility [abandonment] derives from ignorance or a flawed value judgment. You can, in fact, be unaware of Judaism, of its influence on your character; as a result, you may not take into account the role that it played and it continues to play or its contributions to human civilization.
You can also deny Judaismâs value, believe it dead or dying, see in it nothing that is productive or nothing of which it is worth being attached.
However, even if you ignore or disdain Jewish ideology and other spiritual values, you remain Jewish by yet another aspect of our character: the social aspect, which does not concern ideas but rather groups. Would someone who wishes to assimilate, leaving by the wayside all that is Jewish in him, want to be a part of a Jewish group emptied of all ideological substance and clearly of less worth? Would he want to go through his whole life carrying the crushing burden of the hereditary and indelible imperfection of belonging to a despised group? He will instead do everything he can to get out of this group, and thus have to act like those who wish to assimilate because of othersâto please them and, above all, to escape them.
The second form of assimilation is that which broadens and develops, which allows a whole Jew to live also as a whole man. Limited by definition, this form of assimilation can only be applied to those values allowed by Judaism, those which can be adopted without betraying your own Jewish values. These must be known, studied, valued, and exalted: by affirming the value of Jewish culture, of Jewish ideology, of the contribution of Jews to humanity; and by affirming your belonging to the group of Jews, proudly, gloriously, by upholding Jewish honorâin which the worth of the Jewish group is reflected in each of its members.1
Translation and Commentary
Chaïm Perelman, âLa Question juiveâ. Synthèse 3 (1946) 47â63
To understand a problem, it is necessary to know the facts, and only history can provide us the facts of a political problem as complex as that known as the âJewish questionâ. Needless to say, it is not our intention to replace the study of a current problem with a historical account; however, in order to understand contemporary events, it is essential to sketch out at least certain features of Jewish history, without which our understanding of the present will remain imperfect.1
The person who takes up the study of the Jewish problem for the first time cannot help but find the fate of the Jews strange: having been scattered for nearly two thousand years among the peoples of Earth, they did not assimilate with their neighbors and disappear, leaving no other traces of their past than footprints covered in desert sands. So many empires, so many peoples, so many civilizations have disappeared over the course of the last five thousand years that it is only due to fantastic coincidence and the patient work of archeologists that we sometimes have knowledge of their existence. Even peoples as close to the Jews as the ten tribes that formed the kingdom of Israel have vanished as if swallowed up by their neighbors, while their destiny had been for so long tied, and then parallel, to that of the tribes of the South. In fact, the kingdoms of Israel and of Judah (which had been created by the partition of the State of Solomon) were both destroyed by their powerful neighbors to the North, the kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, and of Judah by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. In both cases, the same deportation measures were applied to all the elites, and apparently included the whole urban population. Whereas the tribes of Israel provide an excellent example of a minority population assimilating into the surrounding populace, the exiles of Judah carefully preserved their own character.
During the Persian destruction of the Babylonian Empire, many of them returned to Palestine to reconstruct a new State there. Those who stayed in exile were effective in supporting their brothers who experienced a political renaissance thanks to Cyrus.2
How can we explain the differing behavior of the Jews and the Israelites? It seems that the only valid explanation lies in the action of the prophets, who completely transformed the Jewish religion. Until the eighth century BC, this religion was a henotheism: it affirmed the existence of a single tribal god, Yahweh, tied to the Jewish people and to its territory; his power was manifest by the power of his worshippers. This belief, however, did not in any way exclude the notion that other tribes also had their own god, one that was perhaps less powerful and less prestigious, but one that played for his worshippers the same role as did Yahweh for his worshippers. Each tribal god was like a flagâa symbol of the grandeur and the power of his tribe.
The destruction of the kingdom of Israel had naturally led the exiles to abandon their local god: it was natural for them to acknowledge the superiority of the national god of Assur where they lived. But Israelâs decline inevitably led to a revolution in the minds of those who were concerned by religious and national problems in the kingdom of Judah. Was it necessary to accept the defeat of Yahweh and his subordination to the god of Assur? Certain politicians of Judah, and especially those within the entourage of the king, were ready to resign themselves to this possibility, but the prophets found another solution. They disassociated the grandeur of Yahweh from the power of his people: if they suffered a national catastrophe, it was that they had disobeyed the commandments of their god by transgressing rules which, for certain prophets, were of a purely ritual nature and, for others, of a particularly moral nature.3 Yahweh avenged himself, and he cruelly punished those who had turned away from him; in his anger, he used foreign tribes as his instruments. The weakness of Israel did not lead to the decline of Yahweh; in fact, it testified to his ever greater power, which extended to many other peoples beyond those who recognized him as their god. Over two centuries of successive expansions, this theory of the prophets prompted an evolution of religious thought from henotheism to monotheism, from the belief in a tribal god to the affirmation of a sole God, creator and master of the universe. During the exile of Babylon, it was understood that the worship of Yahweh could be practiced outside the borders of the Holy Land. There was still the hope that obedience to the divine commandments would appease the anger of Yahweh, and that he would once again make use of another foreign prince, but this time to allow the reconstruction of the kingdom of Judah. This prophetic project carried out by Cyrus only made the trust grow in Yahweh, proclaimed as a unique and all-powerful God.
The renaissance of the State of Judah on theocratic bases, followed by a final editing of the Pentateuch in the fifth century BC, provided Judaism its definitive character, in which nation and religion were intimately blended, which would continue for centuries. When the political existence of Jews was destroyed for the second time after the destruction of the second temple in 70 AD, the Jewish religion, thoroughly infused with nationalism, maintained the unity of Judaism. Almost all the religious feasts commemorated events of the national past, and the words of the prophets imploring divine mercy for the rebuilding of the destroyed State can still be found in many prayers.
We know that Christianity, born within one of the numerous sects of Judaism, was for many years in Rome confused with Judaism in a shared persecution. We know how, especially because of St. Paul, apostle to the Gentiles, Christianity separated from its Jewish origins. It abandoned rites that characterized Judaism, transformed the meaning of numerous feasts, and incorporated all sorts of Greek influences, so that it became a universal, catholic religion, preserving of its historical origins only the respect for the Holy Land and the Old Testament. And it insisted especially on the moral and universal elements that it found in the great prophets of the Old Testament, and removed the nationalist sentiments that mark so profoundly all their writings.
Over the course of their later development, Judaism and Christianity both sought to sharply separate what differentiated them. Christianity, reinforced by the ideas of the Greek philosophers, insisted upon universalism. Judaism insisted upon the national aspect of its religion, from which it tried to banish any Hellenistic influence. If such an opposition frequently deteriorates into hostility, it is normal in the life of groups, and particularly in groups of the same type that cannot have members in common. If we do not wish our group to merge with another, we are very much obligated to accentuate the differences between them.4 Insofar as we attach value to that element which typifies our own group, we must inevitably disparage that which opposes a neighboring group to ours. While primitive Christianity, in remembrance of the Holy Family and the twelve apostles, granted a privileged place to the Jews, later Christianity identified the Jews as responsible for the sufferings and death of Jesus, and considered all Jews who remained faithful to the belief of their ancestors as more or less complicit in it. Having become a State religion, Christianity extended its power so that the Jews would be kept legally inferior, and made efforts to forbid them to proselytize, which only accentuated the closed character of the Jewish religion. Throughout the Middle Ages, which was in the West dominated by the Catholic Church, the Jews lived in the interstices, if not in the margins, of Christian society.5 In the Muslim world, which comprised not only the Near East and all the North Africa but also a large part of the South of Europe, and especially Spain, they occupied a similar position, although one that was better on several levels. The separation of the Western world into two blocs, the Christian bloc and the Muslim bloc, also separated Judaism in two parts that are even today rather distinct one from the other, the Jews termed âfrom Spainâ [Sephardi] and the Jews âfrom Germanyâ [Ashkenazi].
Denied a place in the landed economy of feudal society, the Jews very naturally dedicated themselves to commerce and especially to international commerce. Given the primitive means of transportation available during the period, this commerce could only involve such rare materials as spices, perfumes, jewelry, fabrics and precious metals; this commerce of luxury goods was complemented by artisans who worked with these precious materials.
Unable to constitute a military aristocracy, it was natural that the Jews did not hold in great esteem men who were distinguished in the handling of arms; their aristocracy was based on secular as well as religious knowledge. This explains their passion for intellectual professions.
They devoted themselves not only to the study of Judaic law (the Talmud), but also to philosophy, astronomy, geography, and especially to medicine. We know that before the Crusades, Jews constituted one of the rare links that united the Christian world with the Muslim world, and that they, especially those Jews from Provence, played an essential role in the transmission of Greek thoughtâand especially the writings of Aristotleâto the Christian West.6
From a legal point of view, the Jews had a special status. They were under the protection of kings and princes, to whom they paid high fees in exchange for this protection. While the central power most often protected them, Jews were nonetheless exposed to the hostility of the surrounding population, who saw them not only as foreigners, but especially as infidels, about whom were propagated the most extraordinary legends. Every misfortune that went beyond the usual was attributed to them. Life in the ghettoes, which separated them from the rest of the population, by the very fact of this separation also protected them. Let us point out that until the end of the tenth century, life for Jews was relatively peaceful; however, the period of Christian imperialism marked by the Crusades was fatal for them. If it were necessary to undertake a war against the unbelievers, it was indeed normal to begin with those who were close at hand. Almost every Crusade began by the massacre of the Jewish populations in the towns through which the crusaders passed. In Jewish communities, the crusadersâ approach understandably caused terror.
It was at this time that the great exodus of the Jews toward the countries of Eastern Europe began. These were less-developed countries, where far-sighted monarchs considered the absence of urban centers as a weakness. Very significant emigrations occurring during the years 1096, 1147, and especially 1348 (the year of the Black Plague, during which the Jews were killed on the pretext that they had poisoned the wells so as to propagate the plague) cleared the Jews âfrom Germanyâ from nearly all of western Europe. They were received very cordially by the kings of Poland, who granted them special status.
We leave to historians the task of untangling to what extent the anti-Jewish persecutions of this period were caused by religious hatred and to what extent they were an outcome of the desire of the urban bourgeois, for whom this was a period of growth, to get rid of threatening competitors. Whatever the cause, Judaismâs center of gravity was displaced to Eastern Europe. The Jews âfrom Spainâ lived in peace until the end of the fifteenth century, but the infamous Spanish Inquisition dealt a mortal blow to the most prosperous Jewish community in the world. Thousands of Jews converted to Catholicism, thousands perished at the stake or drowned in the sea; those who were able to escape settled chiefly in Turkey and in Italy, and especially in the Netherlands, where they contributed substantially to its prosperity.
In feudal society, where social classes were distinct, each with its own mode of life, having a different legal situation, the Jews were a middle class people par excellence, as distinct from the knightly aristocracy as they were from the peasant population tied to the land. Before the development of towns (and of persecutions), for a Jew to convert to Catholicism would have meant leaving a society that provided a means of living and falling into nothingness, for he would have been able to enter Christian society only by becoming part of a religious congregation. During the early Middle Ages7, a Jew could only essentially withdraw from his community and convert by becoming a monk. The development of cities [Communes] in Western Europe8 coincided with a time of terrible persecutions; in Eastern Europe, where Jews emigrated in masses, they found the conditions of the Western Early Middle Ages, so that it was almost impossible for a Jew to leave his community without losing his place in society or entering the monastic orders. Under these conditions, it is not surprising to find that over the course of the Middle Ages, the Jews, devoted to the practices of their religion, speaking their own language, wearing special clothes, kept to themselves, mixing very little with the surrounding population, always more or less distrustful and hostile. In an extremely divided society, with its classes that were more or less closed and legally differentiated, where political power was reserved for a small minority, the Jews formed one specific category among many others. Each group had its own rights, its own liberties or privileges, and it was necessary to demonstrate possession of them in order to be able to claim them; in short, judicial inequality characterized the Ancient Regime.9
We know that in the three centuries that preceded the French Revolution the structure of feudal society collapsed; we know that the development of the bourgeoisie went hand in hand with the strengthening of centralized power and the assault on all privileges. Rationalism, the philosophy of the growing bourgeoisie, propagated the concept that every human being was endowed with reason, and by this fact, enjoyed a specific dignity that guaranteed a set of natural rights allowing him to play an active role in society. This egalitarian and universalist notion was later reinforced by utilitarianism and economic liberalism; the latter made free competition the basis of social progress, which was supposed to lead to the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Any privilege favoring a particular group to the detriment of the general good had to be eliminated; it was even necessary to consider eliminating any group that came between individuals and the State, which served as the guarantor of liberties for all. These liberties would no longer need to be demonstrated, but would be presumed, unless they were limited by explicit measures, for one should have the right to do anything that has not been expressly forbidden. As a result of this ideology, which was that of the French Revolution, all inhabitants of the State became free citizens with equal rights.
The French Revolution constitutes a turning point in the history of Judaism; its repercussions were profound. Indeed, if on one hand the very logic of the revolutionary system demanded the emancipation of the Jews, on the other hand, their recognition as citizens equal in rights required them to submit to common law, to renounce the specific laws of their community, and to distinguish themselves from their fellow citizens only by their religion, the exercise of which was assured by virtue of the freedom of religion.
Jews in France were afforded a new status at the time of Napoleon. The Jewish community, whose members were united by ties as numerous as they were complex because of their ancient history, was no longer to consider itself as a purely religious community. As a result of law, the Jews became citizens of the Israelite religion; no longer was there anything that separated them from the rest of their fellow citizens.10
This new concept, which spread gradually, revolutionized Judaism. Most countries granted civil and political equality to the Jews only much later: some did so after the Revolution of 1848; others, especially those of Eastern Europe, granted it ever in only a purely nominal way. More important, this period was the first in Christian society to acceptânot as an exception but as a general ruleâthe rights of Jews, as equal citizens before the law, to participate in the economic, political, and social life of the State where they lived. This situation allowed them to develop economic activities even more freely as, one by one, the various impediments, which in the past had limited the development of personal initiative, were overcome under the effect of liberal doctrines. We find Jews playing an important role in finance and international commerce; they participated in the development of all the new industrial fields produced by the new scientific and social techniques, which furnished the nineteenth century its reputation. Further, the Jewsâ access to western culture enlarged their intellectual horizon. Not only did they play a leading role in mathematical and natural sciences, but they were among the most dynamic theoreticians in the social and economic sciences. Jews were the most enthusiastic defenders of all the democratic, liberal, egalitarian, universalist, and rationalist idealsâall these new ideas that we traditionally attach to the ideology of the French Revolution and that are so intimately tied to a belief in the unlimited progress of humanity. For that matter, this entire current of ideas went hand in hand with an ideology of Jewish assimilationâat any costâwithin the surrounding population. Rationalist and universalist concepts had naturally led the Jews to eliminate (as far as possible) all that differentiated them from the majority of their fellow citizens. Some sought to reform the Jewish religion so as to bring it closer to Christian faiths; others cut ties with the Jewish religion entirely. There were those who carried this desire of assimilation to the point of conversion; others sought to marry non-Jewish women so as to firmly mark their rupture with Judaism. Even more, to accentuate this rupture, some did not hesitate to join the opposite camp of the vast majority of intellectual Jewsâthat of clerics, conservatives, and nationalists, who essentially represented the interests of the Church, the army, and property owners and, in general, the rural population in which the Jews formed only a tiny minority.
For the second time in its history, the Jewish community was threatened with extinction as a distinct group. We have seen that, during the collapse of the kingdom of Judah, the ideology developed by the prophetsâthe belief in a single and all-powerful Godâprovided the cement that had united, in exile and later after the destruction of the temple, the Jews who found consolation for their military weakness in a sense of spiritual superiority. It was the idea that they were the trustees of the only true religion that allowed them to defy pagan peoples for centuries; it was the belief in God and in the holy books that allowed them to endure Christian persecutions for centuries. But just as rationalism and the liberalism had destroyed the structure of the Ancient Regime, in the first half of the nineteenth century it also broke apart the frameworks of Jewish society. Perhaps a complete and lasting triumph of the individualist notions of the French Revolution might have achieved that which neither the force of arms nor the fear of persecutions had not been able to accomplishâto assimilate the Jews and cause them to disappear as a distinct group.11 Two factors, however, prevented this evolution toward complete assimilation: on one hand, the counteroffensive of conservative, protectionist, and nationalist forces that became very violent at the end of the nineteenth century; and on the other hand, the fact that the improvement of the legal situation of the Jews, as we have already noted, had not been simultaneous in Eastern Europe and in Western Europe.
It seems, in fact, that these liberal ideas culminated around 1880.12 From then on, antisemitism was used as an effective weapon of political propaganda serving conservative interests in Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, and Russia. The Jews constituted an ideal target for conservatives not only because some Jews played a role in liberal politics, but especially because, by exploiting antisemitic sentiments for political ends, conservatives were able to identify the adversaries of the parties on the right either as Jews or as under the influence of the Jews. Among the slogans of political propaganda, that of international Jewish capitalism preceded that of Judeo-Marxism by several years.
The use of antisemitism as a political weapon presupposes the existence of anti-Jewish sentiments in the general population that it was necessary to develop and amplify. And this leads us to devote some attention to the problem of antisemitism.
For a very long time, this problem provided material not for a theoretical study, but rather for passionate debates, either attacking the Jews or defending them. Instead of understanding a phenomenonâthe hatred of Jewsâa guilty party was sought; the antisemitics and the Jews both accused each other of moral and intellectual perversity. Explanations of a psychological, and especially sociological, nature shed much light on this question.
In fact, antisemitism is only one particular case of a very widespread phenomenon: the opposition of groups. It is a distinctive feature of any social group, whatever it may be, to object to other groups, especially those that are of the same type. We have pointed to the particular case of the opposition of Christianity to Judaism, but this phenomenon appears frequently not only among religious groups, but also among national, professional, sporting groups, etc.13 To be opposed to others is a means of self-assertion. A claim may even be made that such an opposition, as long as it does not surpass certain limits, can create a healthy rivalry propitious for the emergence of the highest values. It is natural for each group to extol its own values while seeking to contest those claimed by competing groups. Furthermore, the preference for the values of oneâs group will be matched by the preference for other members of the same group, who will be considered as superior to members of rival groups. A certain number of qualities will be granted a priori to each member of oneâs own group. If experience refutes our assertions, we will get around this by asserting that to every rule there are exceptions. The same assertion will allow us to consider as exceptional any member of an opposing group whose merit we are compelled to acknowledge. For that matter, this is one of the principal functions of collective attributes ascribed not to individuals but to groups: to provide âreasonsâ that justify emotional attitudes. This rationalization, moreover, goes generally hand in hand with a ranking of qualities that we believe should be attributed to our own group and denied to the opposing group. This opposition of groups generally plays out in a similar fashion within groups: any newcomer to a group is considered, if not as inferior, at least as suspect, and must merit by his behavior the confidence that would be spontaneously granted to the members already within the group.
For centuries, everywhere they lived the Jews were minorities, different from the majority of the population from a religious and social point of view, and often even from other points of view. Unlike other minorities, they did not have a military force, and could not count on a foreign force for their protection. Indeed, the Jews lived for centuries at the mercy of the majority that surrounded them, and to whose sentiments of tolerance they had to appeal in order to survive. The legal emancipation of Jews in Western Europe, which had strongly increased their political influence, had also caused additional tension with certain groups that considered themselves as representatives of the majority. We see why clerical, conservative, and nationalist propaganda was able to endeavor to discredit secular, liberal, and democratic ideals by identifying them with an international Jewry. Supported by a pseudoscientific construction, racist ideology put the concluding touches on the arsenal of political antisemitism as we know it.
If antisemitism in Western Europe before the First World War had been expressed principally politically and socially, in Russia, after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, it was openly encouragedâif not organizedâby the czarist government, and degenerated into persecutions and pogroms. Instead of reforms, the leaders of Russia found it more expedient to grant to its people a different kind of satisfaction by allowing them to persecute a defenseless minority. This policy caused, after more than five centuries, a new exodus. A great migration of Jews, seeking better conditions of existence, went this time from the East toward the West; this migration increased progressively. Between 1881 and 1914, more than three million Jews emigrated to the United States, to South America, and to Western Europe. This flood of numerous Jewish emigrants, bringing with them their customs, their ways of thinking, and the language of their countries of origin, strongly reinforced the Jewish communities of Western Europe, but also fueled antisemitic propaganda.
In the countries of Eastern Europe, and especially in Poland, the Jews lived in dense communities, comprising up to 90% of the residents of certain towns. Subjected to legal restrictions, faced with discriminations of every kind, they lived for the most part almost isolated from the rest of the population, speaking their own language, Yiddish, even wearing special clothes, deliberately ignoring every other culture than the Judaic culture. They felt utterly different from the rest of the population and constituted a national minority that was very distinct. The development of nationalist ideas, in the name of which they were attacked, had repercussions on the ideals of this minority itself. Over the course of their history, the dream of constituting a people had likely never been abandoned by the Jews. But whereas in Western Europe liberal ideas had favored a strong current of assimilation, in Eastern Europe they were surrounded by hostility, which contributed to bringing to life the ideal of having a nation, the spirit of which runs through Jewish religious writings. For Jewish intellectuals, having been influenced by modern culture, arose the idea of recreating in Palestine a Jewish State that would solve the anomalous situation of the Jews in the world. It would give them a political and social structure that would make them less vulnerable; it would give them a status that would allow them to be no longer dependent upon the tolerance of the majority population among which they lived. Zionism became a key idea. In 1882, it sparked an initial Jewish emigration in Palestine. Instigated by Doctor Herzl, a Hungarian Jew who was very assimilated but who had been strongly shaken by the antisemitic turmoil provoked by the Dreyfus affair (Herzl was at the time a correspondent in Paris of a large Viennese newspaper), Zionism became a political reality. The Zionists, whose position was reinforced by antisemitic excesses, found their incessant efforts soon crowned with success. In order to gain Jewish sympathy, and especially in the United States, still neutral at that time, the British government in 1917 promised to support the creation of a National Jewish Homeland in Palestine. This promise, known officially under the name of the Balfour Declaration, was later integrated as one of its conditions in the Mandate for Palestine granted to Great Britain in 1922.
After the destruction of czarism and the carving up of Russia following the first World War, Eastern Europe was reconstructed under the aegis of the victorious Allies, and the Jews thought that the wave of democratic ideas current throughout the world at the time would bring an improvement to their lot. In almost all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, they obtained the status of national minority under the protection of the League of Nations. They enjoyed everywhere a complete equality under the law, but this equality was purely fictive. The tide of nationalist ideas rapidly destroyed any hope that could have been nurtured for an improvement of the situation of Jews in Eastern Europe. They were treated everywhere as foreigners except in Czechoslovakia, which was the only democratic nation in western terms.
The status of national minority, which had fostered so many illusions, gave the nationalist majority an additional reason to hate the Jewish population. The discrimination against the Jews had at that time essentially economic consequences: not only were all jobs forbidden to them, but progressively their ability to practice professional occupations [professions libérales] was restricted, and the tax system was used as a weapon of economic annihilation. A new stream of emigration developed from Poland, Romania, and Hungary.14 But, this time, the doors of the United States were closed as a result of unemployment and economic crises. With its 27,000 square kilometers, Palestine became the principal country for Jewish immigration: nearly 400,000 people immigrated here between the two wars.
This was not a simple immigration meant to provide individuals with better conditions of life. It was a matter of creating a vigorous social and political organismâa human community that might eventually be self-sufficientâin a desert, in a profoundly backward country.
Supported by an ideology that strengthened (by means of the prestige and vigor of great nationalist currents) a deep-rooted Jewish tradition, driven by the hopes for a free and dignified life, a people comprised of intellectuals, of bourgeois, of artisans, of city-dwellers, without the least support from public authorities, began to construct a social organism, in which agricultural colonization, in the harshest of conditions, had to constitute an essential part. A modern economy was built on lands that were neglected or cultivated in the most primitive ways.15 The Jewish population created its own settlements, its towns and villages; it developed the most important industry of the Near East; it built by its own hands all that constitutes its present patrimony. It organized in Palestine a center of modern life, with its powerful unionized institutions, with its network of schools and medical centers, with its University, founded in 1925, which constitutes at present, from cultural, scientific, and technological points of view, the most brilliant intellectual center of the Near and Middle East.
It may have been feared that this Jewish colonization occurred to the detriment of the Arab population but, in fact, the difficulties were not of an economic nature. The Arab population of Palestine doubled in thirty years, surpassing 1,100,000 people. The population increase was especially felt in mixed regions inhabited by the Arabs and the Jews. Mortality fell from 30 to 20 per thousand; Arab workersâ wage rates increased considerably, and tripled those of workers in Egypt or in Iraq. The increase in budgetary revenues allowed the administration to improve the standard of living of the Arab population and even to reimburse a share of the Ottoman debt it had contracted before the war. And if we observe that Transjordan, which was separated from Palestine in 1922, continuesâwith its 50,000 square kilometers and its 350,000 inhabitantsâto lead a primitive life, largely dependent upon Great Britain, we can accept the idea that the Jews contributed to the improvement of the Palestinian Arabsâ lot.16
If there were difficulties, they were especially of a political and social nature. On one hand, in part under the influence of English propaganda, nationalism spread throughout the Arab world. We know that economic benefits, no matter their importance, may not count in nationalistic sentiments. On the other hand, the development of a modern community, with its trade unions, its democratic and representative institutions, was bound to introduce an element of trouble into a semifeudal society, as is still the case in almost all of the Near East, where to date a few great families monopolize all political power.
It was thus these political and social reasons that incited radicals among the Palestinian Arabs, under the direction of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, to oppose the creation of a National Jewish Homeland in Palestine. Three timesâin 1921, in 1929, and in 1936âthey roused grave unrest that led to the death of several hundred people. The British authorities then authorized Jewish settlements to provide for their own protection. When in 1936 unrest provoked by Axis agents seriously threatened public order, Captain Wingate, who later became famous in the campaign of Burma [Myanmar], reorganized the Haganah, the military force of the Jewish community of Palestine, which succeeded in quelling the unrest. Until the somber days of El Alamein, the Haganah, armed by the English, constituted the only group on which the Allies could count in all of the Near East.
English policy has always consisted of calming unrest by making concessions to the Arabs. In 1922, Transjordan was separated from Palestine and established as an independent state. In 1930, the Simpson report proposed a halt to Jewish colonization. Finally, the Peel report, published in 1937, divided Palestine, establishing two independent states and a mixed zone in the region of Jerusalem under international control.17 This project, which received the backing of the British government, was declared unachievable in 1938, because it was thought that an Arab state created in this way would not be viable and could not be self-sufficient.
While the new Palestine was being built, the World was watching, passively, the development of events unique in History. In Germany, a party had come to power in 1933 that galvanized the German people by using a weapon which it would use without any scruples and with the greatest effectivenessâracist antisemitism. By creating the âmyth of the 20th centuryâ, Hitlerism succeeded in uniting the different classes of the German people in an opposition to 600,000 people lost among a population of 65 million. Not only did antisemitism allow the Hitlerians to increase their numbers, but it also provided them the possibility of legally despoiling an entire population, which they obliged, moreover, to emigrate in order to escape death. This [forced emigration] thrust the responsibility for several hundreds of thousands of persons without resources on democratic governments, and especially on Jews throughout the world, and this during a period of crisis. Further, antisemitism was used in the foreign policy of the Third Reich as an instrument permitting the crystallization of movements favorable to Hitlerism worldwide.
In Palestine, Axis agents developed an anti-Zionist and anti-English movement that seemed dangerous for the government of Chamberlain, faced as it was with the threat of war emerging on the horizon. After the failure of the partition, when events in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia considerably increased the number of Jews seeking a National Homeland, the British governmentâknowing that it could always count on the Jewsâ support in any future conflict and seeking to appease the Arabsâpromulgated in 1939 the White Paper, which virtually canceled the Balfour Declaration. Its fundamental provisions included: limiting the region where the Jews could freely acquire lands to 5% of Palestine, and the number of certificates granted to the Jews for the subsequent five years to 75,000; and making all later immigration depend upon the consent of the Arab population.
Not only did the entirety of the Labour opposition rise up with vehemence against this repudiation of a solemn commitment, but M. Churchill had the harshest words for the government for its capitulation that accepted a new Munich in the Near East. The Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, responsible for the oversight of mandates, forcefully criticized this new policy, which was clearly contrary to the spirit and the letter of the Charter that had entrusted the Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain.
For millions of persecuted peoples, the stipulations of the White Paper closed access to the only territory where they were welcomed. A number of boats filled with refugees were chased from the shores of the land that had been granted to them as a National Homeland.
However, from the moment of the declaration of war, the Jewish community of Palestine quieted its resentment and rose up, as one, to Englandâs side. British experts were unanimous in recognizing the precious aid they brought to the Alliesâ cause, whereas the attitude of the Arabs was rather ambiguous, not to mention worrisome.
We know how in the first two years of the war, the invasion of almost all of Europe left more than half of the Jews of the entire World to Hitlerâs mercy. We know how a minutely detailed plan of extermination caused one of the great tragedies of Historyâthe methodical annihilation of nearly ten million Jews, having been first stripped of their possessions. This was accompanied by a cruel and cleverly orchestrated antisemitic campaign portraying the Jews, who they were going to destroy mercilessly, as having diabolical traits.
The defeat of Germany and the rout of Hitlerism did not put an end to all of its victimsâ sufferings. Around one hundred thousand Jews from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Austria who had been saved from a certain death in the extermination camps by the Allied advance decided not to return. These countries, where the inhabitants had stripped them bare, denounced them, and turned them over to the enemy, had become only a cemetery of their past. In any case, in these countries they would live in an atmosphere of hatred such that their nerves were no longer capable of enduring. Indeed, some who had returned to Poland, or to Czechoslovakia, quickly returned to the camps. A Jew was no longer sure of his life except in large cities. If he wanted to regain possession of the goods that he had entrusted to a neighbor, if he wanted to recover his business, he was advised to abstain from such action by a letter threatening in short order a fatal outcome. Very quickly afterwards, moreover, the great majority of the 80,000 Jews saved in Poland, followed by most of those who had returned from Russia, took to the road toward the territories occupied by the Allies. It was especially in Poland that the situation became tragic. The Polish tradition of antisemitism, exacerbated by Hitlerian propaganda, was unleashed, not only for material gain, but especially to serve as an instrument in the political struggle against the contemporary Polish government. In fact, they wanted to portray the government not only as pro-Russian and communist but especially as Jewish, which would clearly suffice to put an end entirely to its popularity. They wanted it to be compromised by obliging it to take up the defense of the Jews. In order to thwart this maneuver and to do away with the Jewish question in Poland, the Government found one effective solution, which consisted of making the emigration of the Jews from Poland easy. But where were they to go?
Tens of thousands of Jews were welcomed into the American zone of Germany, in Austria, Bohemia, and especially in Italy, whose welcome was especially cordial; others arrived in France or in Belgium; thousands were welcomed by Sweden. Nowhere did they find permanent status. Whether they lived in the camps of the UNRRA [United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration], or whether they found private lodging and were supported by the assistance of the American Joint Distribution Committee, American Judaismâs aid organization, they remained in a provisional situation.
The only country that was ready to offer them definitive asylum was Palestine, but the measures of the White Paper of 1939 granted entry to only some tens of thousands of persons. Was this situation going to continue?
Unlike the Conservative party still in power, the Labour party took the Zionist cause to heart. At the [London, February 1945] World Trade Union Conference, with the support of Soviet delegates, it passed a resolution in favor of the National Jewish Homeland. And soon every one of its leaders in the electoral campaign that followed affirmed that one of the essential points of the Labour platform was the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, as much to avoid in the future the reoccurrence of events as tragic as those provoked by Hitlerism as to compensate the Jewish community in Palestine for its great contribution to the war effort.
When Labour obtained a crushing majority in the elections of [July] 1945, the Zionists were jubilant, and all Jews hoped that the unhappy life of their coreligionists in the camps would end shortly. But they became disenchanted very quickly. British Labour, finding themselves under violent attack by the U.S.S.R., had only one thing in mind: to reinforce the strategic positions of the British Empire. But Palestineâsituated at an essential and strategic point in the Near East, where the pipeline that supplied the British navy (which could serve as protection for the Canal of Suez when the British troops would evacuate Egypt) of the Eastern Mediterranean at Haifa was locatedâis hemmed in by the mass of Arab countries. If it is true that Arab countries are still very backwards,18 that they are incapable of resisting even a small modern army, that they are divided among themselves, they are nonetheless thirty million inhabitants occupying immense territories where the precious reserves of oil are located. In comparison, the 700,000 Jews of Palestine appear rather few.
Knowing that it was faced with an adversary that would not hesitate to use any trump card against it, the British government did not want to upset the Arab world. On the other hand, it was difficult for it to repudiate from one day to the next a policy that it had advocated for such a long time. A single solution remained: to hedge in order to gain time.
In the meantime, the victims of Nazism had to remain in the camps. Neither for them, nor for the Jews of Palestine, nor for the Zionists from all over the world, was the wait easy. Was the policy of the White Paper going to live on? How could we believe that Palestine could provide Jews with a national Homeland if the homeless victims of the Hitlerian persecution were not allowed to go there?
The whole Jewish community of Palestine decided to fight for free immigration to Palestine and for the abolition of the White Paper. This fight took the most diverse forms, from political opposition to terrorism. The latter represents the form of resistance of fanatics, who believe that Great Britain understands only a single argument, that of force. However, the most violent form of resistance consists of the clandestine immigration of Jews to Palestine. From every camp in Europe, across every border, thousands of refugees flow toward the banks of the Promised Land. They have nothing left to lose, and Palestine constitutes their only hope. The English have mobilized a large part of their navy to chase these small boats that bring desperate Jews from all over to the country of their ancestors. The boats are confiscated, the people are sent to camps in Cyprus, but the flood continuesâ¦.
Perelmanâs parents named him Henio at birth. He often signed his articles âChâ. rather than âChaïmâ, even in his articles published in La Tribune juive, which led three editors of articles he wrote to unfold Ch. into the name Charles, as Ch. was a common abbreviation for Charles in French.
See our translation of âDe lâarbitraire dans la connaissanceâ, above.
In a letter written 2 September 1970 to Antonio Pieretti, Perelman insists that he be considered a Belgian rather than Polish philosopher. Brussels, Université libre de Bruxelles, Perelman Archives BE.ULB-ARCH/89PP 037.1.
This is the theme of Schreiberâs unpublished biography, Chaïm Perelman et la double fidélité, and Willy Bokâs eulogy, âChaïm Perelman ou la double fidélitéâ, La pensée et les hommes, Revue mensuelle de philosophie et de morale laïques 28 (1984â1985) 71â76.
Perelman wrote, âElle [la doctrine de la double fidélité] mâa dicté un double devoir: envers la Belgique qui mâa généreusement accueilli et qui mâa offert les possibilités dâun développement intellectuel, dans une ambiance de liberté et de tolérance, et envers Israël dâoù viennent mes racines qui mâont fourni le fondement de ma moraleâ [It {the doctrine of double fidelity} decreed that I have a double duty : toward Belgium, which generously welcomed me and offered me the possibility of intellectual development in an atmosphere of freedom and support, and toward the Israel of my roots, which gave me the founding principles of my morals]. Cited in G. Eyskens, âHommage posthume au Baron Chaïm Perelman, à lâoccasion de son anoblissement par S. M. le Roi, Palais des Académies, 8 February 1984â (pp. 2â3), in Fela and Chaïm Perelman papers (2006.432), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC, USA. Series 18: Condolences.
Bok, âChaïm Perelman ou la double fidélitéâ 71.
M. Bolduc, âThe New Rhetoric Project as a Response to Anti-Semitism: Chaïm Perelmanâs Reflections on Assimilationâ, Journal of Communication & Religion 39. 2 (2016) 32â35.
Schreiber, âChaïm Perelman ou la double fidélitéâ 13.
C. Perelman, âDear Mr. Prime Minister 10 January 1958â, in Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Jewish Identities: Fifty Intellectuals Answer Ben Gurion (Leiden, 2002), 290â292. Janice Fernheimer reads Perelmanâs response to Ben Gurion as an example of dissociation, in âBlack Jewish Identity Conflict: A Divided Universal Audience and the Impact of Dissociative Disruptionâ, Rhetoric Society Quarterly 39.1 (Winter 2009) 55.
Bok, âChaïm Perelman ou la double fidélitéâ, 73â74, referring to Perelman, âà propos de la philosophie de M. Dupréelâ, Revue de lâUniversité de Bruxelles 37.3 (1932) 399.
See Schreiber, âChaïm Perelman ou la double fidélitéâ, 13.
Dimitry Shumskyâs portraits of major figures of Zionism explores the evolution of the philosophy of Zionism, and reveals that Zionism after the war was that of a nation-state for Jews alone. See Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion (New Haven, CT, 2018).
C. Massange and J.-P. Schreiber, âLa communauté juive organisée face à lâengagement pro-palestinien (1973â1982)â, Les Cahiers de la Mémoire Contemporaine 13 (2018) 177.
Perelmanâs remarks were made in an interview held 16 November 1973, as cited in Schreiber, âChaïm Perelman ou la double fidélitéâ, 59â60.
C. Perelman, âRéflexions sur lâassimilationâ, La Tribune Juive (Brussles), 31 July 1935, 51â52.
In his 1932 article âà propos de la philosophie de M. Dupréelâ (398), Perelman applies Eugène Dupréelâs theory of consolidation to the development of contemporary Judaism, marked first by assimilation (after 1789) and subsequently by antisemitism (after 1880).
Perelman will continue to contest assimilation, as witnessed in his meditations on the difficulties faced by Jewish youth growing up in Belgium in âFace à la jeunesse juive de la diasporaâ, Université libre de Bruxelles, Perelman Archives BE.ULB-ARCH/89PP 48.2.
C. Perelman, âLa question juiveâ, Synthèses (1945) 47â63.
Carnet 5, Brussels, Université libre de Bruxelles, Perelman Archives BE.ULB-ARCH/89PP 43. Fritz Bernstein was a German-Jewish émigré to the Netherlands, and a leader of the Dutch Zionist movement. In his Over Joodsche Problematiek (Arnhem, 1935), he described (at 21) the ambivalent relations between Dutch Jewry and the newly arrived Jewish refugees from Germany in the 1930s. See also D. Michman, âMigration versus âSpecies Hollandia Judaicaâ: The Role of Migration in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in Preserving Ties Between Dutch and World Jewryâ, Studia Rosenthaliana 23 (Fall 1989) 70â71. Bernstein had published in 1926 Der Anti-semitismus als Gruppenerscheinung: Versuch einer Soziologie des Judenhasses (Berlin, 1926) (published in English under his Hebrew name Peretz Bernstein, as Jew-Hate as a Sociological Problem [New York, 1951]), which argued that antisemitism is an expression of the frustration of a majority group taken out on a minority group, and thus an example of group enmity.
C. Perelman, âUne conception sociologique de la question juiveâ, La Tribune juive (31 July 1935) 51â52.
Unlike Perelman, Bernstein left his adoptive home of the Netherlands, emigrating to what we know now as Israel in 1936.
Carnet 15, Brussels, Université libre de Bruxelles, Perelman Archives BE.ULB-ARCH/89PP 43.
Schreiber, âChaïm Perelman ou la double fidélitéâ, 20â21.
See W. Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, trans. M. Epstein (New York, 1913), 184â185. Sombartâs work first appeared as W. Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig, 1911). Sombart, in responding to Max Weberâs 1904â1905 Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, proposed the Jews at the origins of modern international capitalism. See M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: With Other Writings on the Rise of the West, trans. S. Kalberg, 4th ed. (New YorkâOxford, 2009).
R. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity (New York, 1997).
Will Bok recounts how Perelman was supported by Professor Tadeusz Kotarbinski in his refusal to sit in the ghetto bench in 1936 while studying under him. Bok, âChaïm Perelman ou la double fidélitéâ, 74. Among the anti-Jewish ordinances enacted in late 1940 was the interdiction of any Jew to engage in any public profession, including teaching. From 1942, Perelman worked for the German-sponsored Association of Jews in Belgium [AJB] while simultaneously taking part in the Jewish Resistance as a part of the Committee for the Defense of the Jews [CDJ].
See the posthumous âNotice sur Chaïm Perelmanâ produced by the Académie Royale de Belgique, 81.
In his letter to Lucien Steinberg (whose work he is correcting) 12 May 1970, Perelman recalls the speech he gave at the liberation of the camp, surrounded by the prisoners and other members of the CDJ, in which the existence of the CDJ was made public. Brussels, Université libre de Bruxelles, Perelman Archives BE.ULB-ARCH/89PP 037.1.
See D. Mikhman, Belgium and the Holocaust: Jews, Belgians, Germans (Jerusalem, 1998), 527. See also M. Paldiel, Saving Oneâs Own: Jewish Rescuers during the Holocaust (Lincoln, NE, 2017), 273â274.
F. Perelman, Dans le ventre de la baleine (Brussels, 1947).
Her title, Dans le ventre de la baleine, is a clear reference to the Biblical Book of Jonah. See D. A. Frank, âA Traumatic Reading of Twentieth-Century Rhetorical Theory: The Belgian Holocaust, Malines, Perelman, and De Manâ, Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007) 308â343.
TN: Unlike the sentences of the rest of the article, this concluding sentence is lengthy, employing a bipartite construction of secondary clauses. More important, it provides an apex to the article as a whole, and manifests this sense of culmination by its very structure of intensification. Its use of infinitive verbs (connaître, étudier, apprécier, exalter, rendered here as past participles) and of adverbs tied to a sense of majesty and greatness (fièrement, glorieusement) builds to a crescendo, stylistically and emotionally.
TN: This evocation of the present prepares the reader intellectually, but not emotionally, for the rupture of academic style in the poignant conclusion.
TN: Perelmanâs reference to Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, acknowledges the important role Cyrus played in Jewish history, and may also indicate Perelmanâs own keen awareness of the precarious contemporary situation of fellow Jews. Cyrus is mentioned in the prophecies in the Books of Ezra and Daniel as destined to rebuild the temple and restore the exilic community; in history he was known for his religious clemency toward Babylonian and Jewish religions alike, for having both restored temples (Babylonian and Jewish), and having allowed exiles to return (in particular to Judah). See R. N. Fryeâs 1962 The Heritage of Persia (Repr. Costa Mesa, CA, 2004); E. Bickerman, âThe Edict of Cyrus Iâ, Journal of Biblical Literature 65 (1946) 249â275.
TN: Perelmanâs use of the verb âdissocierâ here is significant, as it manifests his reflections on how dissociation takes place in the world of belief.
TN: This statement encapsulates Perelmanâs sociological explanation of the origins of antisemitism.
TN: Here we see Perelmanâs recognition of the theological origins of anti-Judaism.
TN: It is important to note that Perelman does not demonize Christianity or Islam, nor does he adopt the dystopic view of Jewish history.
TN: That is, broadly speaking, from the 5th to 10th centuries.
TN: i.e., during the High Middle Ages of the 11thâ13th centuries.
TN: The term âancien régimeâ refers to the political and social situation in France before the Revolution of 1789.
TN: Perelman here constructs an Israelite identity.
TN: Notice how Perelman gestures here at his 1935 âRéflexions sur lâassimilationâ.
TN: The term âantisemitismâ is attributed to Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist, in his best- selling Der Sieg des Judentums über das Germanentum [The victory of the Jews over the Germans] Repr. (Norderstedt, 2016) in 1879, which firmly suggested that the âJewish Problemâ was racial rather than religious in nature. See W. I. Brustein, Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust (Cambridge, 2003), 130â131.
TN: Compare with Peretz Bernstein, whose 1951 prologue calls his own 1926 account of anti- Semitism as naïve. See P. F. Bernstein, Jew-Hate as a Sociological Problem, trans. D. Saraph (New York, 1951).
TN: Here Perelman evokes his own history of emigration and that of his family.
TN: This statement reflects Perelmanâs acceptance of the Zionist narrative a people for a land for a land without a people, but as we know, the Palestinians were already present there.
TN: We would now recognize such a statement as Zionist propaganda.
TN: Recall that in her recollection of their rhetorical turn, Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca notes that they had read Richard Crossmanâs speech in delivered in the House of Commons on 1 July 1946 relative to English policy in Palestine. âRencontre avec la rhétoriqueâ, Logique et analyse 3 (1963) 5.
TN: We would now recognize such a statement as Zionist propaganda.