Durkheim and the Jews of France (review)

· Book Reviews 155 detective work to establish the identities of persons to which the letters refer. The volume is an extremely important contribution to Jewish and German literary and cultural history. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Department of German University of Illinois at Chicago Durkheim and the Jews ofFrance, by Ivan Strenski. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1997. 226 pp. $41.00 (c); $15.95 (p). Twenty years ago Ivan Strenski and I sat around a seminar table at the University of California at Santa Barbara discussing theorists ofreligious studies under the guidance ofWalter Capps. The NEH seminar, designed for scholars teaching in religious studies departments but trained in other fields (in my case, history), irritated me. The more I read these founding theorists who created the field of religious studies, the more I thought I was encountering versions of Christian truths, some more compelling than others but still mostly Christian. Such categories ofanalysis left me, a Jew, dissatisfied. Until we got to Durkheim. In Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life I discovered a voice I recognized. His insights regarding religion's social character, his definitions of sacred and profane, even his theory of knowledge resonated in an unexpected way. Perhaps, I wondered aloud, Durkheim offered critical tools of interpretation that I could use because he did not rely on implicitly Christian, albeit secularized, ways of understanding the world. These questions led first to a seminar paper on Durkheim's confrontation with modernity as a Jew and subsequently to an article ("David Emile Durkheim and the Jewish Response to Modernity," Modern Judaism 6 [1980]: 287-300). Now Ivan Strenski has written a formidable book challenging me and others he calls "essentialists" for arguing "that Durkheim's thought is really a secularized form ofJewish thought ..." (p. 1). Strenski forcefully rejects such claims and urges instead a shift to "an historical approach to the issue ofthe Jewishness ofDurkheim's thought" that pays attention to context and what Strenski calls "real Jews," that is, Durkheim's contemporaries in France (p. 8). Using Durkheim's own theories, Strenski suggests that Jewishness is not a category of nature but of culture, in relation to a social reality. So far, so good. As an historian, how can I not applaud such moves to contextualize Durkheim? In fact, Strenski has uncovered a rich array of sources speaking to Durkheim's intellectual and political engagement with Jewish contemporaries, especially within the world of French academia. Strenski focuses on four strands of Durkheim's thought: his "societism," his symbolism, his rejection of Christian scholars' "scientific" attack on the Talmud, and his connection with Sylvain Levi (through his nephew Marcel Mauss, who studied with 156 SHOFAR Summer 2000 Vol. 18, No.4 Levi) and the politics of Aryan scholarship on Indian religions. Each chapter grows progressively more complex as Strenski widens intellectual circles around Durkheim. Beginning with a discussion of nationalism and individualism, Strenski moves to link Durkheirn's views on society to patriotism and the desire to demonstrate loyalty to France, especially in face of an undercurrent of antisemitism. Yet Strenski shows how Durkheim's understanding ofreligion also contravened widely accepted views within the French Jewish community ofhis day. Strenski analyzes the splits between religious modernists and conservatives, deftly placing the Jewish debates next to parallel conflicts among French Catholics and Protestants. He then discusses in greater depth some ofthe Jewish modernizers, or those he dubs "neo-Jews," to demonstrate Durkheirn's concern for concrete "things," not disembodied ideas. The penultimate chapter on Sylvain Levi, Mauss, Buddhism, and Hindu religious culture, the concept ofsacrifice, and the historiography ofFrench Jewish practitioners of Jewish studies, or Science du Judai"sme, argues for a coded response to specifically politicized charges against Judaism as a religion in the modem world brought by antisemitic champions of the Aryan myth. Durkheim's emphasis upon ritual as causative derives not from Robertson Smith as much as from Mauss, who learned these ideas from Levi. As in his chapter on how Durkheirn read Talmud, namely as embodied Judaism, evidence ofa vigorous living religion, Strenski carefully dissects the complex currents ofintellectualpolitics that Jews navigated as modems in France. By recovering the close connections with practitioners of the Science du...