Jewish Faces in French Cinema Part 7

Shifts in Taste and Sensibility

There were occasionally explicitly Jewish characters on [American] television, but if aliens invaded planet Earth with only Must-See TV as an anthropological guide to the peoples they had conquered, they would think ”Jew” equalled “single neurotic urban male who lives exclusively in New York and dates blond women who seem bemusedly to tolerate him”….[1]

It has been noted recently that there has been a regular cascade of new books and articles on Jewish films and cinema about Jews, not just in America or Israel, but in the world at large.[2]  Though I have not even attempted to read all these new books, reviewers have shown what each book is about and where the trend seems to be going.  From these reviewers and the books they deal with, it would seem that research has focused on the kind of people, actions and situations are depicted, with attention also on the ideological trends to be observed.  If we expand the scope from film to television, allowing advances in home videos and satellite stations devoted to older films, the range of electronic or digital works of art and entertainment breaks many of the older shibboleths about how general audiences would react to Jews, Jewishness and Judaism on screen used by Hollywood and other directorial centres in western nations to keep those topics on the margins, in the background or under the surface.

The transition is exemplified by a late 1980s American sitcom The Wonder Years.[3] An episode from 1989 called “Birthday Boy” (first aired on 11 April 1989) showed the main character, Kevin Arnold (played by Josh Saviano) a typical though bright and articulate boy with secularized parents being best friends with a somewhat gawky but not unintelligent Jewish boy of the same age, Paul Pfeiffer (played by Fred Savage).  At the time of the Jewish lad’s bar mitzvah, Kevin—whose voice-over is the narrative guide to what is going on and what he is thinking in the scenes presented—listens to his friend prepare his prayers and reading skills for the upcoming ritual, joins in the dinner-table conversations with the extended Jewish family, and comes to envy what he vaguely comprehends as the meaningfulness of the Bar Mitzvah both as a religious rite of passage and as demonstration of family closeness, the moral and domestic significance of Paul’s grandfather’s gift of an heirloom (siddur or prayer book) and seemingly most of all a sense of intergenerational continuity lacking in his own life.  At first, not sure why he is jealous, Kevin says that he cannot attend his best friend’s Bar Mitzvah ceremony or party afterwards—because it is also his own birthday.   Though the two boys’ birthdays do not fall on identical days, the need to celebrate Paul’s ritual in a synagogue on Saturday means there is a conflict and Kevin, who had known this for a while and saw no problem because of the timing of his own party at home, seizes on this excuse to back off from sharing the joy with Paul.  In the course of this episode, Paul makes several attempts to establish an emotional closeness to his own father and find something meaningful in their bonding that will be equivalent to Jewish tradition; and this equivalence is found, albeit with some hesitation and scepticism, when Mr. Arnold invites his son to work on the family car so that mechanical skills and some anecdotes about his grandfather are passed on. 

Sweet and nostalgic (one might say, instead, banal and sentimental, as well as superficial and insulting) as this already dated comic programme is, it does exemplify an inadequate attempt to integrate Jews, Jewishness and Judaism into mainstream viewing time.  It represents the so-called demarcation line of 1990[4] that Shai Ginsburg cites Nathan Abrams’ The New Jew in Film as claiming when a normalization of Jew, their behaviour and their religion shift from the exotic otherness of the early period to the assimilated familiarity of the present.  Ginsburg points out the superficiality both of the terms Abrams uses—wherein Jewishness consists in images and actions such as sexuality, bathroom activities, and clothing style, and Judaism has been reduced from its dynamic variations to a misrepresentative version of neo-Orthodoxy–and its post-modernist theoretical bases.  There is also, not only a too-easy slide between film-makers (directors, producers, actors, distributors), audiences (ordinary spectators, professional critics and university professors of sociology, psychology, politics, and other social studies) and theory-bound ideologues of political correctness in all the media, but also an over-emphasis on North American experiences, as though tis stereotypes and clichés were the dominant mentality of Jewish contemporaneity.

At the same time as there is this new (or renewed) interest in and acceptance of Jews in cinema and Jewish films, there has been, however, historically speaking, an increasing incidence of anti-Semitism throughout the world, including among many so-called liberal, anti-Israeli Jews.  One way to investigate such a trend is, of course, to examine the language used in scripts, to look very closely at the images of persons and actions, and to parse the circumstances that can be seen to drive the action and motivate the actors.  But I think such an approach to what can be categorized as ignorance, misunderstanding or deliberate distortion of Jewishness and Judaism as a civilization is only the beginning of a real understanding the phenomenon, not the place where the study should take us: call it aesthetic, technological or epistemological.  By aesthetic here I mean, of course, something more than an evaluation of the beauty or pleasant or negative emotions stimulated by the films in question; but rather the way in which such feelings are produced by the film-makers and in the imaginations of the spectators, thus something at once cultural, psychological and rhetorical.  By technological, too, I take the approach to go beyond the mere apparatus and practice of cinematography—the way a film is put together out of sounds, actions, colours, mood-creation, and so forth; but how feelings and knowledge are produced, memories stimulated, and allusions triggered.  By epistemological, while closer to the normal philosophical sense of how to recognize, test and apply the truth in moral circumstances, I mean the deepening of the contexts in which reality is perceived as something both dynamic and controlled for rhetorical effects.

It is therefore one thing to note the grotesque imagery that pervades the anti-Semitic media from at least the late nineteenth century onwards and its links through the rise of our own contemporary versions of anti-Zionism, insofar as the perpetrators of these slanders and slurs continue the hate-filled attitudes and perceptions of the racist bigots in the past; but quite another thing, and a very deeply disturbing phenomenon, to see Jewish men and women in Israel and throughout the Diaspora reproducing these same libellous motifs, albeit without indulging in the most extreme expressions of parodic imagery or even being aware of how closely they recreate the same old lies, vilifications and insults.  Thus it would be too simplistic to explain away these recent manifestations in cinema, television and digital formats as merely the result of self-loathing and an obsequious wish to preclude the imminent return of genocidal instincts by seeking to agree with or even outdo the Jew-haters in their ideological campaigns of mockery and calls to violence.[5]

Seeing with Anti-Semitic Eyes[6]

The superficial, the facile, the staccato, and the brilliant repelled him.  Not that he was an “abstract painter”—as the jargon goes.  He was eminently concrete.  He plays a legitimate trompe-l’œil on the optic nerve.[7]

When Max Nordau at the end of the nineteenth century remarked that the anti-Semites seemed to be succeeding because too many assimilated and smugly westernized Jews were victims of what is now called the Stockholm Syndrome, that is, they adapted the viewpoint and the evaluations of their enemies—this in a purely psychological and certainly in a metaphorical sense.  The notion that modern Jews—and perhaps not only them—speak, act, feel and think about themselves with the same kind of deep-seated hatred, disgust and grotesque fear as can be found in Judeophobic writings, parodic caricatures, and pernicious legislations, not to mention even genocidal actions can be amply demonstrated by any glance at the current media.  However, instead of discussing why certain Israelis are willing to work hand-in-hand with their enemies to undermine the legitimacy and security of their state or why others go beyond finding excuses for anti-Semitic violence in Europe and North America to active participation in boycotts, divestment movements and even fund-raising for terrorist causes, I want to look at Nordau’s comments from a different perspective. 

From this other perspective, I want to examine the proposition that Jews actually start to see themselves through other eyes than the ones they were born with, or perhaps in some instances those of their grandparents.  By this, of course, I don’t mean that the actual biological apparatus of seeing has been exchanged in some bizarre surgical operation or genetic experiments.  But working on the premise that seeing, in the widest sense of responding to stimuli, classifying received sensations, recognizing and classifying such sensory events, evaluating and storing these perceptions, and then recollecting them at a later time is a culturally-constructed sequence of phenomena.  In other words, it is not only or mainly a matter of what is said, written and broadcast in response to circumstances, but rather something more deeply implicated in the epistemology and aesthetics of seeing and recollecting, making the perceiver essentially unaware of the dysfunction and distortion, and assuming that his or her consequent judgments and actions are logical outcomes.

Is there something distinctive about the way in which traditional Jews perceive the world, formulate their memories, call to mind past experiences, and register their visual memories in verbal or tangible form?  How does the Jewish imagination work in modern French cinema and what does it work from and towards?

NOTES

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[1] Rachel Shukert, “ABC’s New Sitcom ‘The Golbergs’ isn’t a Remake and that’s a Good Thing” Tablet (21 June 2013) online at http//www.tabletmagazine.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/135599/sitcom-goldbergs?print=1  However, see David Shasha’s earlier (originally 2009,now reposted 2013) DVD Review “The Lost Jewish World of Gertrude Berg” Sephardic Heritage Update (1 July 2013).

[2] For instance Shai Ginsberg in his review of Nathan Abrams, The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012) on H-Net Reviews (June 2013) lists two collections—Lawrence Baron, ed., The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (2011), Daniel Bernardi, Murray Pomerance and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, eds., Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema (2013)—and several older studies—Lester D. Fridman, Hollywood’s Image of the Jew (1982), Patricia Eens, The Jew in American Cinema (1984) and Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (1989; repr 2010).

[3] Created and written by Carol Black and Neal Marlens, The Wonder Years was directed by Steve Miner.  “Birthday Boy” was the thirteenth episode of the second season in the series.

[4] This was the period, too, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War came to an end, and then the clash of cultures and the end of history didn’t happen with the rise of the Islamicist menace and the beginning of the War on Terror. 

[5] David Shasha in “The Lost Jewish World of Gertrude Berg” puts it this way in his acerbic statement: “We have tragically moved from a warm and giving heimische immigrant Jewish culture typified by perhaps the best-known American Jew of the first half of the 20^th century, to a Hollywood Jewish nihilism that marks Jewish couture and the Jewish psyche as fatalistic and hopelessly, fanatically misanthropic” (See Note 1 above).

[6] For a more sustained discussion on the theoretical basis of such technologically-enhanced  “seeing”, see Norman Simms, In the Context of his Times: Alfred Dreyfus as Lover, Intellectual, Poet and Jew   (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013), esp. the Prologue

[7] James Huneker, Unicorns (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917) p. 103.  Huneker is talking about Paul Cézanne. James Huneker, Unicorns (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917) p. 103.  Huneker is talking about Paul Cézanne.

J'accuse in three voices

JOB

All day long the friends came into his tent,

Drank tea with his wife, and watched the man

Pitiful now, covered in boils, sitting on his dung heap.

When he spoke, they tried to comfort him,

Assured his anguish would disappear

If only he acknowledged his mistakes,

Apologized to his maker.

But he answered them and pointed out the flaws

In their arguments, the strained analogies,

The inferences wrongly drawn,

The liturgical poetry full of contradictions,

Birds falling out of the sky like thunderbolts,

Ostriches burying their eggs and forgetting where.

Then the welkin and the whirlwind spoke,

Like the young examiner who had joined them all,

And tried to silence the jabbering old fool,

Said he did not realize how ancient were the days,

The great expanse of universe on universe

Where leviathans and behemoths were grazing,

And justified his ways by power and precedence.

Job cowered on the pile of filth,

Peered out into the blinding light,

Proclaimed he was defeated, but not his logic,

Not his all essential innocence.

The storm clouds passed and eventually the winds.

And then beyond belief the voice returned.

It addressed the three old men and the arrogant youth

To tell them they were wrong all of them,

And he, the wretched ironist was right,

And they were to restore his losses and his prestige,

And that it all was a testing time, a little game

Inaugurated eons earlier on the porch of heaven

With they knew who.

The tragedy was never consummated therefore,

Although the loss of children was not reconciled

And vast doubts persisted ever since.

DREYFUS

A young soldier was accused, the evidence was false,

The army and the state were insulted

By his claims to innocence, his chutspa,

And off he went to Devil’s Island half-mad.

Then after some signatures were gathered and some protest

He was brought back to Paris five years later.

Forgery, fraud and flatulence,

The same fatuous accusations.

Another trial with the same old lies

And the same arrogance in Rennes.

Haggard, tottering, unable to speak,

They found him guilty yet again

To their own shame.

But they had to concede some little technicalities

And grant a pardon, a grudging grace,

But he would not shut up.  I am innocent.

But the army never really accepted the findings

Of the civil courts.  He sat alone and then he died.

In due course, too, when the Swastika slobbered over Paris,

They took their revenge on him and all his kind.

Karsenty

Now again, when a simple man speaks up for truth,

Calls journalism propaganda

They vilify his efforts, mock his case, and turn

The world inside out to undercut the facts.

A little boy was murdered, they said, a martyr,

Though no bullets marked the spot, no corpse was shown;

It was enough the demonic ones were there to prove the cause.

In a small instance, he won his point, and they,

As usual, rallied their supporters, inverted language,

And had him found guilty again,

This time without a compensating clap of thunder

Or a pretence of sympathy. 

It’s journalism, its integrity, its honor,

But the truth is otherwise and other where.

As always until we return to the second voice

In the whirlwind, the unflagging voice of J’accuse.

Inquisition and Psychoanalysis Part 3

As this long essay comes closer to the heart of the argument, the way in which the Iberian Inquisition acted as a forerunner of late nineteenth-century psychoanalysis, the historical circumstances need to be sharpened, new terms have to be introduced, and a set of concepts refined to provide the intellectual lens through which to see these phenomena.

More Definitions and Distinctions

Yet in another sense, these rival concepts of secrecy and discovery were also dynamic systems of social-construction and personal-revelation in regard to remnants of the Sephardic communities in Spain and Portugal.  Insofar as the themes, images, and activities of text and counter-text—that is, two or more versions of a truth that jockey for position or seek balance in juxtaposition—manifested themselves, the concepts or conceits formed part of a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Baroque culture in which the fusion of incongruous, uncoordinated, and discontinuous modes of being could be celebrated as elaborate and ingenious conceits, grotesque collocations and emblems, or anamorphic plays (including stage plays) on perspective[1] and paronomasia[2].

In the figure of anamorphosis, wherein scenes and bodies are elongated, distorted, and foreshortened, there developed an optic through which we can now attempt to discern the actual shape and content of what then constituted inquisitorial secrecy in the sense of profound shifts in mentality—changes often too subtle to register on the consciousness of the individuals and the groups involved in the process.  In this way, other social and psychological tensions, which seemed utterly incompatible or unendurable, could play themselves out in secret—unconsciously, as they were articulated into one of numerous anti-texts, the existence of which, when brought to conscious awareness, threatened the viability of the other as a legitimate, emotionally-satisfying matrix of identity..  These anti-texts, I want to argue, were possible and endurable only because they were perceived in anamorphosis and thereby not read at all or misread as threatening counter-texts; so that each side in the game of inquisitor versus suspected heretic, on the one hand, recognized the historical substantiality of the other, though, on the other, denying theological validity, that is, ultimate reality, to its rival.

In this last sense of mirror-distortions, two different—not always opposite and incompatible—pictures or narratives of self and society jockey for position and are precariously juxtaposed.  But the deformations and concealments may have also hidden those aspects of each text which made them more than viable or unviable alternatives.  This when simplistic antitheses break down and superficial notions of irony as sarcasm fall apart.  The situation was far more subtle, nuanced in its balances or pseudo-balances, and complex, with often only minor distinctions or distortions pretending to be mirror-reflections of one another.  This is where, too, concepts such as clinamen[3] and antonomasia[4] come into their own. 

They could also be text and anti-text, in the sense that those aspects of the manifest appearance of one and the other constitute only part of their full expression, a significant part or most of which could neither be seen by the other or fully realized by the self; but which, if allowed to move out of the shadows or the silence that masked them, their mutual fullness would cancel out or destroy at least one of the textualities altogether.  At a more nuanced level, the images that seem to reflect back upon one another with hostility are actually very close in specific details or patterns of relationship: the small differences nevertheless are sufficient to cancel out the essential identity of each, leaving only a very thin shimmery or shadowy essence that can barely be discerned from either side of the looking-glass.

Moreover, any juxtaposition into a so-called metaphysical conceit or stretching out of shape into a virtually unrecognizable configuration always risked, at the moment when playfulness and witty conceptualizing ended, cracking apart or losing touch with the vital point of game-enhancement.  These anti-texts did not only seek to occupy completely the space of consciousness and cultural plenitude of the other, but above all to eradicate any rivals.  However, in the processes of this struggle, they also created the conditions in which their own self-professed identity was transformed into a condition of illogic and unacceptability.  Hence the secrecy--the silence and visibility—of the Inquisition in its dealings both with the heresies and perversions it sought to cleanse and exclude from Christian society was, on the one hand, a disguise, to itself as well as to society at large, of its anti-Christian reality; and the other, it was a form of collective national madness that it shared with the rest of society insofar as Iberian society permitted the Holy Office to exist and helped it to function.

At the same time, when the Holy Office sought to expose by secret means the concealed Jewishness of the Judaizers it arrested, intimidated and tortured, the Inquisition in fact created new kinds of Jews where no conscious (practicing) Jews had existed before or could exist in the aftermath or wake of the Inquisition’s persecutions and threats of torture; and, when it belatedly recognized this secret or at least had some inkling of its presence, it could only attempt to destroy these judaizantes before they had a chance to express anything but the heretical “Dead Law of Moses” modelled on inquisitorial instruction. The physical, as well as spiritual annihilation of these grotesque and mad forms of Judaism seemed necessary by the zealots and fanatics to avoid recognizing how grotesque and insane the Inquisition itself was.  However, simultaneously, the Judaizers who learned to be some form of Crypto-Jews—we call them Marranos in a strict sense[5]—from the interrogations and instructions of the friars and other agents appointed by the Holy Office to force the accused to confess to their heresy and renounce it in favour of a penitential rebirth as Christians, made disturbingly evident—in a manner that had to remain secret to the outside world and to the inquisitors themselves—that their own religious tradition was informed by Jewish roots and concepts, however much distorted or denied. 

Should an accused Judaizer be convinced by the inquisitors that he or she was a heretic and to seek through penitence reconciliation to the Church, that return to the one true faith involved a procedural acceptance, too, of the need to repress any public statement of having passed through this process.  What happened in the secret processes and in the torture chambers of the Holy Office would always have to remain concealed, so that, in this distortion of Christian love and forgiveness, the Catholic faith was compromised, the Spanish or Portuguese identity deformed, and the individual’s sincerity of penitence made suspect again.  It would have been unlikely anything other than fear of consequences of not reconciling oneself to the Church and therefore of being subject to the very processes denied—the threats and practice of torture—could have convinced individuals to seek penance: such a desire to be a reconciliado meant betrayal of one’s neighbours, friends, and family, of one’s faith in the mercy of the Christian God or the justice of the Jewish Law, and of oneself as a competent, rational and trustworthy person.

In particular, the circumstances of this suspicion and anxiety around and within the family places the child and his or her relationship with parents in a most invidious situation.  This occurs in two main ways.  First adults cannot rely on the discretion of a young son or daughter to guard the family secret, and hence these boys and girls are excluded from the most strategic intimacies of the family.  It often happens that only one child is deemed worthy—trustworthy, strong enough and capable of mature self-control, to be entrusted with the knowledge of the secret Judaism practiced and believed in at home.  Among the other siblings, some are set apart as sacrifices, as it were, by being sent for training as priests or entered into monastic life as monk or nun, this in itself causing further difficulties, in that certain children are aware of the family secret and use their position within the Church also as a protecting and espionage role, while others are evicted from the household as a means of ensuring their silence and non-interference in the secret Judaic life of the family.  The second factor making children crucial to the Marrano or Crypto-Jewish experience lies in the Inquisition’s attempt to undermine the continuity of Jewish tradition in the family by preying upon childish innocence and impetuosity.  Not only are small children indiscreet in what they say directly or inadvertently in the presence of outsiders, including servants and neighbours, any of whom may be paid familiares (informants) or unpaid malsines (jealous neighbours, rival businessmen, greedy passers-by who serve as spies).  Older children endanger the family by incautious boasts or taunts among their playfellows and rebellious adolescents may denounce their siblings or parents out of spite.[6] These tension-ridden circumstances make it difficult for a traditional Jewish family, with its child-reading practices based on emotional interference and caring, to be sustained.  Partly, to construct the image of Iberian normality, boys and girls are chastised, often violently, so servants and visitors do not become suspicious.  Partly, to maintain strict discipline in the home, rigid codes of difference between parent and child, sister and brother, and husband and wife are asserted, again breaking down the unquestioned bonds of the mishpucha (family warmth and closeness) and shalom b’beyit (peace in the home through avoidance of quarrels and external tensions).  Partly, too, given the stress occasioned by virtually constant role-playing and duplicity, fathers and mothers become distraught and lash out irrationally at each other and their offspring. 

Ecclesiastical agents, many of them by the fourteenth and fifteenth century already conversos or the inheritors of such traditions and therefore fearful of the suspicion that would fall on them in delicate situations and eager to project guilt on to others, knew that the most vulnerable place to confront Jews was through their children.  Centuries of persecution had inculcated Jewish parents into the need to protect, educate and love their infants and toddlers with a sustained intensity mostly unknown in other cultures—and when perceived by the non-Jewish society felt as a threat to their own repressed sense of abandonment and abuse by adult caregivers.  Spanish and Portuguese clerics—most often local monks, friars and low-order priests—sought to exert undue influence on these secret Jews and suspicious New Christian, to kidnap and forcibly baptise them, send them to foster them out to Old Christian families or place them in religious houses.  These threats to the stability of the mishpucha, as we have indicated, created extreme anxiety in the home.[7] In the most dangerous circumstances, such as when Jews were rounded up to be baptized under duress or children dragged away from their parental possession, an anomalous instinct or normally dormant archaic tradition broke through; mothers or fathers threw their infants into wells, cut their throats, or enclosed them in acts of collective suicide.  Such scenes are recounted in chronicles narrating the massing of Jews on the docks in Lisbon in 1497 as soon as it became clear that these families had not been brought their for expulsion but for forced conversion and separation of children from parents.[8]

NOTES

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[1] In normal modern usage, perspective refers to two things: on the one hand, it is a way of creating the illusion in two-dimensional drawings or paintings of depth and distance, to the point of a trompe l’œil, a trick of the eye; on the other hand, perspective normally means an individual and unique point of view, a private and specific set of opinions and attitudes about one’s experience of the world.  In the transitional state of epistemology in the period we are looking at, the point of view considered normal, legitimate or sane was shifting and many people found they could not trust their inherited and institutionalized truisms, believe their senses accurate and comforting, or find a steady position from which to look both out outside at the environing world of normal reality or the inward regions of thought, memory or faith.  The Inquisition attempted to impose standards, monitor deviations and control external influences.  Jews forced to convert to escape persecution or attempting to conform and assimilate into the dominant society by accepting baptism discovered not only that they could never be fully integrated—they would always be, even after many generations, New Christians and hence excluded from public offices and privileges—and at the same time having become separated from rabbinical social relations, knowledge and feelings, no longer felt at home in the world.

[2] Paronomasia includes a much wider variety of word-play than is usually considered in the sense of puns, as can be seen when one examines the so-called metaphysical wit or witty conceits of the writers of the early Modern period: poets, essayists and historians, as well as theologians see in the manipulation of letters, syntax and grammar a way of discovering new, long-lost and what we would call unconscious meanings in ancient texts, old pictures and conventional gestures.  The emergence of large-scape duplicity, deception and masking within the society experiencing the breakdown of the medieval order, that is, the millennium-long Latin-Christian synthesis of culture, experienced a sense of the world falling apart and new worlds being discovered in geography, astronomy and microscopic reality.  One of the motivations of the Inquisitors was to root out these previously unseen, unheard and inconceivable aspects of the world in order to protect the conventionalized (“eternal truths”) of the Church.  The great irony of this, of course, is that what the Holy Office thought they were revealing as subversive in order to destroy was actually something they were helping to create.

[3] In Epicurean theory, the clinamen is the seemingly unexpected, irrational swerve of atoms, and thus any bias or tilting away from the normal flow or progression of in a pattern.  In regard to the “fuzzy Jews” in the range of Marrano behaviour, the concept to be considered has to do with what seem like single, one-off shifts, twists and turns, breaks and gaps in continuity, but, over a long period of time (more than three or four generations) the pattern is once again measurable.

[4] Antonomasia is related to metonym and synecdoche as different ways of naming, recognizing and alluding to things.  In particular, whereas a synecdoche gives a part for the whole (or the whole for the part, the producer for the produced, etc., in the sense of “wheels” for a whole automobile or “arms” for the weapons carried by those limbs) and metonym offers one name in place of another (Washington for the government of the United States, London for the government of the United Kingdom), antonomasia generalizes the specific to cover the generic (a note for music or a leaf for a book and everything written, read and understood on it).  These rhetorical figures allow us to conceive of the Marrano experience as occupying what seems like a particular time and place in history and professing a characteristic and legal set of beliefs and practices typical of that specific nationality while at the same time belonging to a longer and different history, a larger geographical spread of peoples and ideas, and a significantly different and illegal practice of religion.

[5] That is, to distinguish these people caught in an amorphous middle position between sincere Christians and secretly believing Jews.  Superficial writers elide the two terms, Crypto-Jew and Marrano, but there are more than a few distinctions that make it wise to keep them apart.  Crypto-Jews are people who have made a decision or inherited a disposition to remain Christian in public acts and professions of faith, while performing privately and in their inner consciousness the religion of their Jewish ancestors, however inchoate or fragmented this may be. Marranos—a disparaging term meaning swine, used sometimes by both professing Jews and believing New Christians, as well as occasionally, usually in Italy, by the Inquisition and its familiars—designates individuals and families who are not sure of their beliefs or their status in relation to the orthodoxies of either Judaism or Christianity; and consequently, at one extreme, may include people who find it most meaningful to themselves to play off one of those “persecuting communities” (as José Faur calls them) against the other and enjoy the thrill of the vacillation itself; and at the other, those who suffer deep anxieties and self-doubts throughout their lives. These ideas are expounded at length with specific examples in Norman Simms Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in Jewish Experience (New York: Peter Lang Verlag, 2005) and Marranos on the Moradas: Secret Jews and Penitentes in the Southwestern United States, 1590-1890 (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2008).

[6] See for instance Norman Simms, “Children among the Marranos: A Psychohistorical Problem” The Queens College Journal of Jewish Studies  vol. VII (Spring 2005) 35-43.

[7] For further discussion and references, see Norman Simms, “Jewish Childrearing in Pre-Modern Times” in Simms, Windows on  a Jewish World The Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Waikato Jewish Studies Seminar, 2003.  (Hamilton: Outrigger Publishers, 2004)  pp. 39-58.

[8] For a particular instance, see Norman Simms, “Devoured by Wild Animals: Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress in the Children of São Tomé” Revista Lusófona das Religiões 5:9/10 (2006) 164-179.

Inquisition and Psychoanalysis Part 2

Historical Circumstances

While there have been other inquisitions before and after the founding of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Iberia, some run by the Church and others by the state in collaboration with the papal government,[1] the most notorious of them are the two in Spain and Portugal.  They were focused on tracking down, arresting, and interrogating recently—and not so recently—converted Jews in order to purify their kingdoms and overseas territories in Europe and the New Worlds of the heretical practice of Judaizing.

More than that, the Holy Offices of the Inquisition were established during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries[2]as state-run institutions in the Catholic Kingdoms Spain and Portugal[3] and, on behalf of a new sense of purified nationalism, sought to delve into the secrets of the individual mind and the unconsciousness of groups to which individuals belonged by intrinsic, “blood” origins. Inquisitors sought to produce evidence of these private secrets in a public “act of faith” or auto-da-fé.   All aspects of the inquisitorial process were carried out in secret by means of intimidation, spies and other informers, and torture.  Everyone involved in the process, victims and victimizers, was sworn to silence.  Although almost all the individuals denounced to the Holy Office and arrested, imprisoned, and subject to its methods of interrogation, were either unaware of the crimes they were accused of or engaged in complex strategies of self-concealment, they were fully aware of the institution’s methods and powers.[4]

In my argument, I will concentrate on the primary targets in the opening years of the Holy Office both in Spain and Portugal and particularly in its operations in their New World colonies to eradicate all signs of the judaizing heresy.[5] From time to time, however, I will refer to other inquisitions, especially in the Italian states, in order to provide a wider context in which to view the way both the persecutors and the persecuted behaved, spoke of themselves, and affected one another.  Because of the Expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the forced mass conversion in Portugal in 1496, legally there were no longer any Jews on the Iberian Peninsula and eventually in the overseas territories (in parts of Italy, the Mediterranean islands, or North Africa) or colonies of the two Catholic monarchies.  Though the Inquisition came to be more concerned with the Lutheran heresy in the last two centuries of its operation, and always had a subordinate interest in seeking out and punishing clerical abuses and sexual improprieties and perversions, its main concern—one is tempted to say, both its founding and defining concern—was to destroy the residue of Jews and Judaism in Iberian culture.  The inquisitors on the whole and at particular times displayed only a passing interest in Moriscos or formerly Muslim New Christians.

The formerly Sephardic New Christians who awaited arrest and who were taken into custody and subject to the bizarre methods of the peculiar institution nevertheless often had an acute awareness of what they were up against. Educated families and individuals shared information and as far as possible prepared in advance for the inevitable knock on the door—to engage with the officers of the Inquisition by playing off their own supposed ignorance of its procedures and that of the institution which sought to find a means of uncovering those truths about its victims which they could only know by second-hand information and through inference from a long list of suspicious signs against which they measured the confessions taken from those victims. Through relatives, friends and sympathetic insiders working for the Holy Office at all levels from inquisitors or fiscals and priests or friars down to jailers and servants, New Christians could learn the formal and informal ways by which the Inquisition worked; there were also persons arrested and later released—whether as penitents (reconciliados) or as cases who were suspended for various reasons—who broke the code of silence explicitly or inadvertently.

  Historically, on the one hand, while there were probably more Crypto-Jews who practiced their ancestral faith in private and, perhaps in a quasi-open fashion in the century preceding the Expulsion, than has usually been allowed for; and on the other, despite the return of many Sephardim who had fled to Portugal from Castile in 1492 at the time of the union of the two royal houses and kingdoms, Crypto-Judaism or Marranism (we shall distinguish between the two shortly) were probably less numerous and influential than has sometimes been asserted in the romantic vision of these phenomena.  Nevertheless, so far as the Holy Office in Spain and Portugal was concerned, judaizantes posed a major threat to Catholic hegemony and seemed to be a dangerous (infectious or contagious) hidden reality in everyday Iberian life for many centuries. 

In that sense, the Inquisition functioned as a quixotic institution, tilting at windmills and destroying the lives of thousands and thousands of real people on very spurious grounds. It created a highly contentious textual pseudo-reality from what it read in books of anti-Judaism, ranging from the New testament through saints’ lives to rabidly psychotic tracts of its own devising or at least influence—and it attempted to impose on this verbal delusion (delirio) the cachet of state and religious authority.  Secrecy permitted the lies of the Inquisition to function without proper supervision by any other crown, civil or ecclesiastical authorities, and the process of discovery—that is, the coercive powers of the Holy Office as a confessional agency to disclose the judaizing heresy—proved to be a mythic event ritualized in the autos-da-fé put on to justify and cover-up the grim realities of arbitrary imprisonment, confiscation, humiliation and torture.

NOTES

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[1] Henry Charles Lea, Histoire de l’Inquisition au moyen âge, trans. Salomon Reinach (Paris : Robert Laffront, 2004 ; orig. French trans 1903 ; English orig. 1888)

[2] These centuries are now designated the Early Modern period; they were previously called Renaissance and Reformation, each of these European and Christian phenomena overlapping with earlier and later periods.  In other words, the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions are conceived in quite different circumstances than the various medieval Holy Offices, and hence their relevance in understanding how the scientific processes of  psychoanalysis were brought into being.

[3] Joseph Pérez, The Spanish Inquisition: A History, trans. Janet Lloyd (London: Profile Books, 2004; orig. French 2002).  In regard to Spain as a unitary kingdom, the terms ambiguous, as the constituent smaller kingdoms and semi-autonomous regions and cities retained different laws, traditions and attitudes towards the Jews, the Inquisition and the nominal rulers of the state; not only does this hold true for the extra-Iberian territories in Italy, including Sicily, and the occupied Low Countries, but also for the overseas colonial territories in America, Africa and Asia.  Portuguese overseas territories also experienced jurisdictional rivalry and disputes between agencies of the Holy Office.  Nevertheless, as this essay argues, one of the modernizing features of the Inquisition was its ability to call upon the aid and information acquired by different branches around the world in order to compile, albeit slowly in our terms, extensive dossiers on individuals and families already arrested or under suspicion.  Just as psychoanalytical treatment can be carried out for many years, so the officers of the Holy Office could conduct inquiries for decades before having sufficient evidence to bring an accused heretic to trial, the individual or family meanwhile spending long periods of incarceration, penance and respite outside of prison.  In other words, persons would have experience life-long anxiety and terror. 

[4] Henry Méchoulan, Les Juifs du silence au siècle d’or espagnol (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003).

[5] Judaizing was the technical term used by the Inquisition both for tendencies within the Church itself to revert towards a literalism that smacked of the Protestant Reformation and for the particular danger of insincere or unconsciously incomplete conversion(forced and voluntary) of Jews to Catholicism.  Because the Spanish and then even more so the Portuguese Holy Office mistrusted all these so-called conversos or New Christians, the very fact of a Jewish ancestry made all these neophytes suspect down to five or more generations. Whereas Sephardic Jews were theoretically given a choice of conversion or exile in 1492, in Portugal five years later there was no choice: all Jews were declared and baptized as Catholics on the same day.  There were, in fact, so many New Christians in Portugal that within a generation and long thereafter any Portuguese person travelling outside the realm was considered to be a Crypto-Jew, and indeed the very term “Portuguese” became a synonym for “Jew”.  A sop to the forced converts by the Portuguese king for this imposition—Jews themselves called these people anusim, “forced ones”. In the sense of rape victims—was a period of “grace” of nearly a generation before an inquisition was founded there.  As a result, the Portuguese Holy Office came into existence with a far larger problem than in Spain, where effectively all real and Crypto-Jews had disappeared by the middle of the sixteenth century and so the primary target shifted to sexual deviants and abusers within the Church, and with greater knowledge of how the secret Jews operated both as individuals and multi-generational families.  By the time that Portugal had been absorbed into the Spanish kingdom, many Crypto-Jews migrated into the formal jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition for greater security from arrest, torture and execution, just as, ironically, after Anschluss, many Jews escaped to German cities such as Berlin for a modicum of respite from persecution by Austrian Nazis.  Safety, however, in both instances was relative and temporary.

The Inquisition A Forerunner of Psychoanalysis Part 1

An Essay on the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition

Prologue

The following essay was recently returned to me after being accepted for publication a few years ago.  When asked if it had ever been printed, the editor first said he thought it had appeared a number of years ago; and then said he couldn't find it.  He subsequently sent the text back to me with no further comments.  This is something that has happened to me before.  In all my years as an editor, going back to the early 1970s, I would never have treated a contributor this way.  An acceptance is precisely that, though there are all sorts of reasons for legitimate delays, delays the editor should inform the author about.  In any case, since I am not up to playing games with other scholarly editors an y longer, I present it here in a number of installments, and will add some footnoted comments to bring it up to date and to explain technical complexities to the general reader. To begin with, let me say that my argument does not at all follow the line that psychoanalysis is a form of mental illness in itself and that institutions create more problems than they solve.  

Introduction

Repugnant and insidious as the Inquisition really was, modern apologists to the contrary, an institution that, by its persistence and organizational skills, along with its analytical acumen, way ahead of its time in regard to the concepts of the mind we associate with Freud and psychoanalysis.  Established both to root out heresy from the bosom of the Church and to help cure the sick souls of those lost lambs caught in the throes of uncontrollable and secret sins, the Holy Office probed deeply into the motivations and ramifications of what we would today call the powers of the id.  Inquisitors acted on behalf of God the Father and Mother Church to rescue their children from the clutches of Satan, assuming an evil counterpart both to the Suffering Son of Righteousness and the creative energies of the Holy Spirit.  In reality, as we know, it was an all too human institution run by fallible, ambitious and often sadistic officials, and on the Iberian Peninsular and the conquered and colonized territories of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs served very worldly political ends.  Like other Kafkaesque bureaucracies to which it proved the first full-scale predecessor, the Inquisition continued for five hundred years thanks to the meticulous and dutiful service of trained lawyers and clerks, that is, to a banality of evil and an arrogance of power.  Nevertheless, this state-run organization—for unlike its own namesake in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Holy Office reported not to the Pope but to the ruling monarchs—developed a concept of sickness of the soul (mental illness), a diagnostic regimen, and a programme of treatment that, stripped of its overt moralism, prefigures modern psychoanalysis.

An Artist For Our Departing Century

The doctor’s long green cigar was powerful stuff

and, seeing the child go blue, he blew out a puff,

the first stinking breath the boy would remember later,

twisting their heads and wrenching their bosoms.  Mater

Madonna Concepcíon couldn’t care less, her dress

in shreds, her fingers digging in at his thighs,

and pointing her nose at the Minotaur in distress,

and with a mare’s last whinny accusing him of lies.

Then he never learned to read or write at school

and married his women carefully by size,

their willingness to play his painful games,

except the one never petrified into a mask,

who defied his gaze more than a sister,  the fool

and harlequin, the pink and blue, the task

of prostitutes, the dance of Guernica.

In the end, he carried a parasol—inflames

her face--and hardly noticed the athlete hurrying past.

New Apthegms No 1

• Having gathered all the weeds together in one pile and set them beside the leaves raked up all autumn, it is time do something spectacular.  Mulch or burn.  Neither: let the wind blow them away again.

• The children gather around the sweets table at the art opening.  They are bored.  I watch them shovel the jelly beans in, and tell them: You should sample all the colors to stay healthy.  They think for a moment and then dive back in.  What would you say?

• For Heraclitus, the soul of man is a far country which cannot be approached or explored; for me, it is a little light in the middle of a dark room I am not allowed to enter.

• Even for Nietzsche, one’s self is a deep well hidden from oneself, the treasure that cannot be mined until the end of one’s days. For me, it is a large stain in the midst of one’s life that keeps spreading.  Or perhaps an amorphous cell that silently grows around the edges of one’s consciousness.

• Someone found my book The Humming Tree, of all places, in Bruges, and wrote to say it changed the way he sees the world.  If I had been in that ancient city, that other Venice of the north, I too would be changed in all my essential ways of perceiving and thinking about the world.  It is enough now, however, to have such a letter and to allow me to dream a little more.

• If the Holocaust never happened, where are the six million Jews?  Do they all live in Miami Beach in luxury retirement villas, on the shore of Tel-Aviv rubbing their hands with glee, hide in deep tunnels in the middle of the Negev Desert waiting for the Messiah, or did they never live at all, and thus all Jews are liars, cheats and ghosts?

• For more than two thousand years thought and feelings were enmeshed in the study of rhetoric, a discipline, a syllabus, a way of seeing the world and a value system.  How to disentangle oneself and write about the reality we experience, without throwing the whole vast treasury of the past out with the bathwater?

• The moon is attached to the earth by an eclipse.

• In our modern world, death has a new dimension.  After the brain is dead, one may keep the body breathing until it is convenient for family and friends to say farewell.  But how do you goodbye to someone who is no longer at home?

• There are not always two sides to every story, even if one of them might be true, but each time a story has two sides, one is like a moebius strip, the other runs wild like a filigree.

From A Poetry Reading in 2007

At the English Garden, Hamilton, March 2007

They were sitting in the little English garden

a host of people who came for what they loved

poetry by which God knows what they meant

and certainly you could tell sitting there they were moved.

I mean a young man all in black fidgeting stared

into the goldfish pool and rocked to the rhythmic beat

of some sweet Avon verses, and then he dared,

when volunteers were invited, to stand and read:

or rather, since he wasn’t finished yet,

composing as he proclaimed.  Another shyly

took her place on the platform, her tongue not wet,

to share some issues unresolved that she

was sure we needed to feel deeply.  And last

a childlike presence announced the day had past.

Jewish Faces in French Cinema: Part 6

New Directions?

This film endeavors to relate the project of this internationalist oligarchy, which has confiscated democracy and people’s sovereignty to the benefit of a caste, by questioning its origins and its networks-lobbies, but, above all, by showing its flaws.  The financial oligarchy wants to drown the world in chaos, blood and warfare, and goes about this through its game of repeated provocations and counterprovocations.  This tactic will help deflect attention from the extremely serious collapse of their system and to stifle any questioning that could change the order.[1]

The mixture of old and new discourses in this blurb concerned with a new pseudo-documentary film (Oligarchy and Zionism, 2013) that has been receiving frighteningly favourable attention in the French media signals a turn to more sinister versions of anti-Semitism in France and elsewhere in the rest of the world.  The term “project” identifies the writer as one of the trendy jargon-ridden authors from within post-modernism, with all its negativity towards western values and its intrinsic separation from the Enlightenment, the Judeo-Christian heritage, and the liberal intellectualism characteristic of almost all previous French criticism.  Meanwhile, the terms, “internationalist,” “people,” and “chaos, blood and warfare” arise from the formulae of 1930s Nazi and Russian anti-Semitism, the Jews being at once the instigators of capitalistic and socialistic subversion of national sovereignty and culture, whereas the phrase “networks-lobbies” elides two other more recent bugbears, the mythical Jewish Lobby that controls American, French and other western governments, and the fantasized Jewish domination of the press and other news and entertainment organizations.[2]  On the whole, though the statement substitutes Zionism for Judaism and oligarchs for Jews, the message is the same: Jews attempt to manipulate the news, control people’s minds, and confuse all awareness of what is going on in the world to their own benefit, even as world-capitalism and the system of nation-states falls apart. 

Although all that we wrote in the first part of this essay stands still after several years a few footnotes aside to amplify some small points, but, taking off from this obscene propagandistic film and its media puffery, what about now in the second decade of the twenty-first century?   There have been an increasing number of films in French about the Arab-Israeli crisis, some of them emanating from metropolitan France, others from Israel, and a few in francophone states.  Whereas on the whole, aside from a few films made during the German Occupation of the 1940s, on the whole French cinema has tended to be sympathetic to Jews and Judaism, as we have seen.  The faces displayed have been those of ordinary people, even ordinary French men and women, but especially French children, suffering from discrimination; the images of grotesque anti-Semitism have been eschewed and the burden of the producers has been to evoke sympathy.  Now, however, given that most of the cinematic industry is dominated by left-wingers, politically-correct and post-modernist personages, the tendency has started to emerge of showing sympathy for Muslims, evoking antipathy for Israel and its defence forces, and raising suspicious doubts about the practices of Judaism, not least its inwardness, anti-modernism, and restriction of women’s rights.  A series of new topoi or clichés has arisen.  In such films young women rebel against their strictly Orthodox or Hasidic parents and communities in order to try to discover their potential as sexual beings, moral persons, and individuals.   Home-life regulated by daily and yearly rabbinical—and therefore male-dominated—rituals is viewed as stifling and tension-ridden, while sisters clash with another, with parents and with the secular society’s tempting array of philosophical and social options.  The scenario may include a flirtation or more serious sexual relationship with an outsider, even occasionally a Muslim, who himself may be caught in an analogous conflict with his own background.  But what is truly unique and important in the new genre is what seems to be a serious and intimate depiction of Judaism and non-completely assimilated Jews.  In other words, the inner, intellectual and emotional qualities of the main characters are no longer there merely as exotic, picturesque or nostalgic aspects of their life, the heart and mind of the figures being shaped by and continually directed towards their Jewish identities and belonging to rabbinical communities.  Or so it would seem.  Closer examination suggests something not quite kosher going on.

La Petite Jérusalem

One relatively recent film in this genre is called La Petite Jérusalem (first released in 2005).[3]

Written and directed by Karin Albou, Little Jerusalem focuses on a Sephardic family recently transplanted from Tunisia living in Sarcelle, an immigrant banlieu (suburban neighbourhood outside Paris and close to a larger menacing Muslim community.  Two sisters, played by Fanny Valette (Laura) and Elisa Zylberstein (Mathilda ), somewhat like the young women in I am Forbidden,[4] quarrel about their role as Jews and as religious females in the contemporary world.   The older sister, Mathilda, out of her commitment to traditional values represses her sexual frustrations, acting coldly to her husband’s advances for demonstrative acts of love; she alienates her husband  Anel (played by Bruno Todeschini) to the point where he is unfaithful with another woman.  The younger sister, the more intellectual and liberal Laura, deflects her increasing libidinal desires into the study of philosophy at university, yet yields to the advances of the somewhat shy and mysterious Arab neighbour, Djamel (played by Hédi Tillette de Clerrnont-Tonerre).  It is implied that he has a dubious political past in Algeria and, because his status as an immigrant is not secure, in order to remain in France he has submitted himself to his own strict religious family. 

Both sisters, however, visit a mikva (ritual bath) to discuss their problems with one of the older guardians (played by Aurore Clément).  This sage woman advises them not only to loosen up in their approach to sexual matters but points out the greater openness allowed in talmudic Judaism than their family traditions teach.  While the frank discussion of physical intimacies from a rabbinical perspective is certainly unusual for a supposedly mainline commercial film  made in France—or anywhere, for that matter—there are also unusual scenes depicting rituals such as the laying of tfillin (phylacteries) by the one adult male in the family or tashlich, the communal casting of bread upon moving waters symbolizing purification of sins, while the study of Talmud at home and the lighting of the Sabbath light are more familiar markers of Judaism.  These actions, some of which are according to the formal performance of mitzvoth (the 614 commandments of the Talmud) and others the localized minhagim or customs, are seen to be normal parts of the family’s everyday life, not oppressive or alienating peculiarities imposed on the members.  

Even though these ritual practices are not explained, they do give a structure and meaningfulness to the domestic life shown in the film.  But this aspect of belief and practice, remain ambiguous.  On the one hand, rather than what some film critics have taken as a strict religious household, the family shows relative toleration of the younger daughter’s predilection for secular studies at the university, and even the supposedly conservative Tunisian mother eventually reveals how open  she was to western styles and values in her youth.  On the other hand, the particularity of the this Tunisian version of Sephardi Judaism is not addressed, and it does seem to be something that represses the sexuality and other emotional freedoms of the two sisters and their mother, an anti-modern patriarchalism, and an irrational counter to contemporary beliefs about gender equality and individual choice.  Without a distinction between the communal participation in archaic customs like the casting of sins on the water and the tying leather straps on the arm and forehead as a mnemonic focus for study and interpretation of the Law, Judaism seems a bizarre and exotic religion, one which permits a multitude of local variations and interpretations.  Keeping kosher, for instance, does not preclude the study of Kant and celebration of Jewish holidays at home or in synagogue does not interfere with being computer literate or diverse professional careers. 

That the two daughters each find some resolution to their personal sense of frustration seems to derive less from the fact of their Jewishness than from their status as second generation Tunisian immigrants living in a close-knit community: at the end of the narrative, the older sister, her husband and son, as well as the elderly mother, agree to make aliyah (to go up, that is, to migrate) to Israel, while the younger daughter, after being rejected her Arab boyfriend, returns to her secular university studies and assumes a more assimilated life, though probably not making a complete break with her broader Jewish heritage.  

Two moments of violence occur in the film, first when a gang of Arab youths attack the older sister’s son in a game of soccer and, second, when a group of Arabs burns down the local synagogue, both events highlighting the tensions in immigrant communities.  Nevertheless, the director of the film  does not explore the nature of the most up-to-date form of anti-Semitism in France—Muslim anti-Semitism[5]—and while it is probably only part of the reasons why Anel decides to take his family to Israel the stronger explanations lie in his search for a stronger relationship between his family and Orthodox Judaism.  The film’s normalization of Jewish religious life at home and its frank discussion of problems at an intimate level begin a process of integrating Jewishness into French civilization.  Some difficulties remain, particularly in making clear the group solidarity and the emphasis on learning that make Judaism seem unusual or oppressive to gentile viewers, as many of their comments indicate.  There is also the reluctance yet to face the two forms of anti-Semitism that are on the rise in Europe, old-fashioned religious and racial bigotry, and the new wave of Islamicist anti-Zionism that much of the intellectual class and journalistic mavens have succumbed to.[6]

Unlike the American situation over the past twenty years, where, despite the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the rise of the hostile Islamicist terrorist revolution, United States film-makers and spectators have accepted Jews and Jewishness as part and parcel of the great mosaic of modern society, albeit at the expense of many distortions of Judaism and social reality.  Yet in Europe and other parts of the modern world (where commercial films are made), the increasing number of anti-Semitic acts and the normalization of anti-Zionist rhetoric into academic and new media discourses, have caused most Jews, not least in France,  to feel under threat—and for that reason they no longer believe themselves to be implicitly confident of fitting in among the societies where they were born or who surround them.   For that reason the closer attention to Jewishness and Judaism in French films cannot be taken all in a positive light.  The acknowledgment that comes close to the surface while very rarely breaking through into an articulate expression of regret for the collusion of both the collaborationist institutions in Paris and the Vichyite involvement the Holocaust is to be welcomed, to be sure, at least as a hopeful sign that greater honesty will be forthcoming.[7]  Yet these cinematic depictions of the round-ups, attempted escapes, and occasional support shown by both the police and ordinary French men and women to the strangers in their midst do not yet amount to an engagement with the deep historical place of Judaism in the formation of French civilization, and therefore of how French Jewry developed its own specific characteristics as against what was created in Spain, Italy, Germany or Eastern Europe. 

While I haven’t noticed any use of traditional Jew-hating figures in this kind of contemporary cinematic mode, such as one meets increasingly in newspaper cartoons and television network news broadcasts, there is a shift in approach to the “Israelite Question”  (to create an amalgam of the old “Jewish Question” and the contemporary problematique of Israel).  But we do find it in the other major politically-correct movement of our day, the so-called Occupy gang, which seems to combine classical anti-Semitic Marxism and Anarchism with a more trendy Nihilism, so that Jews as such are not usually mentioned as such but clearly implied in the attack on international bankers, oligarchs and other blood-sucking capitalists.  The terrible irony and frustration in all of this is that, except for the most extreme of the anti-Zionist films where the merging of Jew-Israeli-Zionist (and therefore even American imperialist colonialist) takes on an unquestioned validity, most of the people involved—and these include many Jewish liberals—do not accept that what they are engaged in belongs to the whole tradition of Jew-hating.  That is because they have redefined the language of liberalism, tolerance, socialism and anti-colonialism as part of the pro-Palestinian victimology which now-a-days absorbs the whole seething mass of self-hating political correctness.  Such an ideology can be seen articulating itself in various human rights organization (that only perceive Israeli perfidy), NGOs for peace (an absolute abstraction and without concern for justice, and consequently appeasement), Marxist rage and envy (but without a properly constructed class analysis, since the economic-social class is replaced by race, religion and pure resentment).

Scholarly discussions of Jews in French cinema have often slipped from a focus on who and what is depicted and to how the realities of Judaism can be understood as part of French civilization, not merely as an exotic or pathetic otherness, to discourses saturated with post-modernist sociology and philosophy.  These discourses require careful and serious analysis, without a doubt, as they are often written by Jews who are attempting at once to understand and distance themselves from their own traditions, or rather, with few exceptions, to formulate what those traditions are since they have grown up separate from them and know them at best through hostile lenses.  However, the conceptual framework of such discourses needs to be recognized for what it is and not treated as a near-transparent instrument to mirror the world of the films, themselves fairly non-problematic mimetic images of reality.  They have also to be taken as related to the more explicitly and rancorous discourses of anti-Semitism, insofar as many of the French Jew-haters have invested much time to study and try to understand Jews and Judaism, seeing in this alien presence something that is at the same time frightening and fascinating, and hence the pseudo-scientific books and articles reflect aspects of the reality not perceived or denied by the politically-correct liberals and more extreme left-wing intellectuals—as we; as making visible and audible the hostile textures of French life that impinge upon as well as shape Jewish experience

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[1] Synopsis of “Oligarchy and Zionism” directed by Beatrice Pignede by UniFrancefilms, cited by Zach Ponts, “French Media Embraces Film that Promotes ‘Zionist Conspiracy’ Theory”, The Algemeiner (5 June 2013) online at www.algemeiner.com/2013/05/31/french-media-embraces-film-that-promotes-zionist-conspiracy-theory. NB the misuse of the singular verb for the plural noun in the title to this article.

[2] For an interesting summary of topics bundled together as post-World War Two anti-Semitism in Germany but in many ways applicable to the rest of Western Europe, see the précis of a lecture given by  Clemens Heni at the World Congress Institute for research and Policy, Jerusalem (27 May 2013): “How Does Modern-Day Germany Deal With Antisemitism?” Wissenschaft und Publizistik als Kritik (4 June 2013) online at clemensheni.net/ 2013/06/04/how-does-modern-day-germany-deal-with-antisemitism-lecture-by-dr-clemsn-heni-wjc-jerusalem

[3] This film did not show in Hamilton until 2013 during a French Festival at the Lido Theatre. 

[4] Norman Simms, Review of Anouk Moskowiits, I am Forbidden in East European Jewish History at EEJH (12 April 2013) online at eejh@yahoogroups.com.

[5] Some critics have noted the superficial sentimentality in depicting the Muslim family and its consternation in discovering their son is dating a Jewish girl.  Unlike the scenes allowing some depth to the Jewish household, albeit with the drawbacks noted in the body of this essay, the tensions at home and in the community that lead the Arab journalist to break off his relationship with Laura are left dangling.  The politically-correct tendency of the narrative suggests that there is a moral equivalence between the two traditional families, a conclusion that can only be categorized as unsatisfactory both aesthetically and intellectually, if not also historically.

[6] A perceptive and fair review by someone calling himself “Goya-1 from France” appears as “A Rare Feminine/Humanist take on Sephardic Judaism” IMDb (18 December 2005) online at hhtp://www. imdb.com/title/tt0428965/reviews

[v7] Norman Simms, “A Cycle of Judicial Memory and Immoral Forgetting: Vel d’hiv 1942” Shofar  30:12 (2012) 123-137.