The Historical/Hysterical Puzzle:
Anamorphosis, Palimpsest or Phantasmagoria
The “Jewish Nation” of Marseilles, numbering about 200 members, was
granted full emancipation by the French Revolution already in January 1790,
almost two years before the genral emancipation of all Jews in France.[1]
Documents show that in Marseilles in 1790 the Jewish community, known as
“Portuguese”, consisted of the Sephardi families from Livorno, Tunis,
Carcassonne and and Greece, as well as from other parts of southern France, many of
whose ancestors had arrived as refugees after the Expulsion from Spain in 1492,
along with the core of the Jewish population who had been there from at least
the first century of the Common Era, and
thus were, if we dare say so, a typical image of the “nation” we are trying to
describe, define and analyse. They had
branches of their families throughout the Levant and the Mediterranean,
considered themselves not just Jews but as ancient trading people like the
Greeks. But their history shows that
their essential components of social, religious and commercial life were
constantly shifting, as they suffered persecution and expulsion, received new
migrants from suffering Jewish communities elsewhere in Europe and North
Africa, and kept intermarrying with other similar men of the nation wherever it
seemed wise and profitable to do so. In
what sense, then, is the term naçio
proper, meaningful and realistic?
When we talk about covert and coded words, images and rituals in this
way, we virtually come to envision the phenomenon of hysteria.[2] Gérard Wajcsman, following Lacanian
psychoanalysis, points out that hysteria is one of those phenomena that cannot
be pinned down, one whose very existence is lost between the hysteric and the
supposedly normal person who views and hears and thus tries to make sense out
of what the hysteric says, and in fact the discourse of the hysteric is
historic insofar as it engages the analyst and the person who cannot make any
sense of this mode of speech. Knowledge
arises out of this engagement between one who speaks without seeming to make
sense, one who listens and cannot understand, and one who records the speech
and therefore, though not understanding, assumes there is sense enough to
preserve the record. Though there is no
sense to any of this beyond the human relationships established, there is a
truth produced, and that is the historical truth of these relationships. If, however, we can keep in abeyance, at
least, the notion that the hysteric is a sick mind unable to communicate
sense—and unable thereby, too, to produce sense in his or her own mind or
body—but rather work with the notion that the hysterical discourse is
deliberately created in response to the hostile misunderstandings and threats
of the surrounding society, the one that prides itself on normality, reason,
and analytical skills (e.g., the Inquisition), then we can argue that the
Marrano and/or Crypto-Jew, in addressing an identity through the discourses of
the dominant society, as well as using the language of rabbinical argument,
speaks in riddles.
DNA: Do Not Analyse
Il y a une nation juive….L’idéale
humain ne me parait pas l’unification politique ou intellectuelle. Une seule unification me semble nécessaire :
c’est l’unification morale.[3]
There is a Jewish nation….The
human ideal appears to me not in a political or intellectual unification. Only one unification seems necessary: that is
moral unification.
It is one thing to argue that all the Jews in the world, past and
present, east and west, Ashkenazi and Sepharadi form a nation, not constituted
by blood—or as we would say today, by genetics—though that seems to be the
case, or at least in terms of « populations » rather than
« races »; and another to say that Ashkenazi and Sephardi form
separate, definablel, constituted on the basis of historical circumstance,
language usage, and cultural propensities; and then to go still further, as we
have been doing, and to say that the homens
de naçio are a sedf-declared and self-defining nationality constituted on
the basis of their more specific historical circumstances.
As Bernard Lazare contends, such a nation—and perhaps here his
definition works better in terms of the men of the nation more than with Jews
over-all or just the Sephardi part of that general entity—finds its parameters
drawn where virtually every other nation does not: without consideration of political
boundaries, legal jurisdiction, linguistic and cultural zones, as well as
genetics, blood and DNA. The difference
is moral. But what does, or rather what
did moral mean at the fin de siècle? For much of the nineteenth century, the word
still held its ancient sense of psychological, and psychological in the older
sense of being concerned with what the mind could think and feel, how the mind
could think and feel, and the relationship between those factors and the
physical body through which the mind had to feel and think.
Then as neurology began to withdraw itself off into a positivistic
science based on study of the nerve system, particularly of the brain, the word
moral shifted towards a greater philosophical dimension; but picking up and
developing an other aspect of its ancient meaning, what it was the mind thought
and felt, and how those processes and products could be evaluated as useful,
beneficial, and spiritual. Whereas
theologicans, meaning Christian philosophers, tended to find that in the
modernizing and secularizing world—that is, in an early modernity following the
Renaissance and the Reformation—the economy and ethics of the body became a
prime arena for the battle between good and evil, the old epic struggle of God
and the devil having lost most of its mythic and cosmic dimensions, and the
term morality was almost reduced to a measure of control over the sexual
functions and the different ways males and females had to moderate their secual
desires and activities.
But for Lazare the tension between Christian morality and Jewish ethics
became a way of dividing up nationhood, in almost a calculus of racial
behaviour. Christians in Europe became
increasingly concerned with individuality, self-expression, personal rights,
political and aesthetic practices, and sexual conduct in private; whereas Jews
remained more concerned with communal and historical continuity, religious
expression, ethical behavior and aesthetic appearance as a group, and
maintenance of genealogical continuity.
The price for this set of differences was anti-Semitism, and Lazare
began to see that the only way to avoid or obviate this new political trend in
Judeophobia was Zionism. He did not
concern himself with the question of where and how Sephardimn were different
from Ashkenazim, or the validity of the nation of men of affairs.
While the anti-Semites also made no real distinctions between the
Yiddish-speakers and the Spanish-Portuguese-Ladino-speakers, their
categorization of Jews as Semites as opposed to the Aryans—confusing, as they
did, linguistic history, cultural development, and biological racism—became
shriller, more threatening, and eventually genocidal. The hallucination of racial differences at
this extreme of existential exclusion led to hysterical dimensions of bigotry
and control.
In a sense, what seemed to be happening in Europe was that circumstances
changed to put Jews at a greater disadvantage after their Emancipation than
before, and to throw back general conditions to that of the Iberian crisis,
after the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal thought they were answering the
“Jewish Question” through forced exile of all members of the Jewish community
who would not convert or by declaring all members of the Jewish community
baptized—any or all of those conversos who did not conform to the the imposed
religion or considered suspicious in their sincerity of acceptance to be
subject to a constant Inquisition. No
former Jew, or child, grandchild or great-great-grandchild of a converso could be trusted and were
always to be treated as a New Christian.
Whether the original baptism had been undertaken voluntarily, under
duress or bequeathed by one’s ancestors, it was insufficient to wash away the
Jewish taint, the devilish stink of the Old Law of Moses, now considered to be
in the blood and not merely in the heart or the mind.
Here was a riddle: What do you call a sincere, believing and
praticing Christian whose great-great-great-grandmother and grandfather were
once Jews? No matter what they called themselves,
they were neither really Christians nor Jews.
No matter what they were called by others, they were sometimes Jews and
sometimes Christians.
The enigma was how can a mortal being, a man or a woman, a
child of God—there were as yet not yet expressions such as human being,
individual, mankind, person—be neither a Christian or a Jew? There was no legal or moral way in which you
could say you had no religion at all, did not belong to a faith community, and
were therefore either a citizen of this or that western nation or considered
yourself a citizen of the world—or an individual with human rights.
Hence the puzzle: Here are the parts, but how do you put them
together? Here the components of a
contraption, but how do you make it work?
Here are the possible routes to the goal, but how do you get there
through the maze or the labyrinth of blocked exits, false and empty turns?
[1] Haim F. Ghiuzeli, “Jewish Communbity of Marseilles,” Beit Hatfutsot one lin at www.bh.org.il/
database-article.aspx?48710.
[2] As so often happens, we have to turn to the anti-Semites to see how the
Jews and Jewish behavior appeared, for though the Jew-haters were wrong,
sought to discredit and misunderstood the intentions and consequences of what
they thought they perceived, they nonetheless reacted to something./ Here is what Serendat de Belzim reports a
fellow anti-Semite saying about Austria: « Du reste, dans la Maison
d'Autriche, l'amour pour les Juifs semble être devenu une attraction
hypnotisante » (For the rest of them, in the House of Austria, love for
the Jews seems to have become a hypnotic attraction) Juifs et anti-Semites en Europe, p. 309. To put it an other way, the court ladies of
Vienna were fascinated by Jews—by their exotic ideas, their cultured
mannerisms, their freedom from Christian obsessions. On the other side, the Jews beginning to
succeed and enter into relationships with aristocracy in Central Europe were
both attracted and repelled by the people they met, and could not but be aware
of the strange feelings they felt their presence aroused.
[3] Lazare, Le nationalisme juif, p. 4.
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