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Sartre et les juifs: actes du colloque international organise a la Maison Heinrich-Heine (Cite internationale universitaire de Paris) les 19 et 20 juin 2003

2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 61; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knm159

1468-2931

Douglas Smith,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

This volume covers five main themes: interpretations of Sartre's major text on anti-Semitism, Réflexions sur la question juive (1946); its relation to contemporary views of Judaism; the disputed circumstances surrounding Sartre's 1941 appointment to the lycée Condorcet; his attitude to Israel; and parallels between his thought and that of Levinas. Its publication has a dual context: first, the revisionist reception of the Réflexions upon its American republication in 1995; and second, the 1997 revelation that in October 1941 Sartre accepted a teaching post at the lycée Condorcet, vacated twelve months earlier by his Jewish colleague Henri Dreyfus-Le Foyer and provisionally occupied in the interim by Ferdinand Alquié. While the revisionist re-reading of Réflexions proposes an inadvertent complicity between Sartre and the anti-Semitism he attacks, resulting in what Suleiman terms an unwitting ‘anti-Semitic effect’, certain interpretations of the lycée Condorcet affair suggest that Sartre profited from the Vichy revocation of posts occupied by Jewish teachers to advance his own career. Both charges provoked fierce debate and the editor of the present volume positions herself as a revisionist. This context results in an often fraught and polemical tone and considerable repetition, with opposing positions being re-articulated to a standstill, as in the transcribed radio discussion between Galster, Alain Finkelkraut and Bernard-Henry Lévy. Many other contributions are, however, sober and even-handed, demonstrating considerable tact and subtlety. The largest subsection is devoted to the Réflexions, with contributions divided between its contemporary context and reception (Grynberg, Vidal-Naquet, Misrahi, Klein) and its more recent rereadings (Traverso, Kaplan, Suleiman). The Réflexions are revisited with a view to investigating their ‘empty’ notion of Jewishness understood as a pure projection of anti-Semitism, their out-of-date pre-fascist vision of anti-Semitism, the contradictions of Sartre's definitions of the authentic and inauthentic Jew, and the silence surrounding the Nazi extermination camps. Many contributors stress widespread French ignorance of the extreme ‘scientific’ racism of National Socialism and its genocidal apparatus until well after the end of the war. This contextualization extends into a comparison between Sartre's attitude to Judaism and that of his contemporaries, Giraudoux, Céline, Paulhan, Édith Thomas and Adorno (Body, Hewitt, Kaufmann, Collin, Weill). Sartre's evolving view of Israel is explored in two pieces (Judaken and Drake) that trace the paradox of his unwavering support for the state from its inception and his sympathies for the Palestinian cause. Two final essays (Bedorf, Saint-Cheron) discuss the relationship between Sartre's thought and Levinas's ethics, focussing on the role of Benny Lévy, Sartre's interlocutor in a series of controversial late interviews disavowed by many Sartreans. Overall the collection assembles a wide range of views on a key preoccupation in Sartre's work that retains considerable relevance and resonance today. Its often polemical tone demonstrates both Sartre's ongoing ability to provoke debate and the central place of Jewish traditions of thought and experience in contemporary culture and politics.