Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust

3. Simone Weil: A French-Jewish Intellectual Journey in the 1930s and 1940s

59 3 Simone Weil A French Jewish Intellectual Journey in the 1930s and 1940s Rochelle L. Millen The year I took a graduate seminar with the noted Canadian professor George Grant, his subject was the writings of a Frenchwoman whose name was then new to me: Simone Weil (1909–1943). Weil’s writings offered new perspectives on religion and spirituality and on social and political issues in a prose that was incisive and elegant, even in translation. Aspects of Weil’s thinking also shocked me. For the essays and jottings of this brilliant, if eccentric, woman, written during the years of Nazism, articulate a vehement anti-Judaism more characteristic of the language and theology of the early Church fathers and the Marcionites than of an assimilated French Jew with a prestigious graduate degree in philosophy from the École Normale Supériere. Of her militant left-wing political positions—her friendships with Simone Petrement, Simone de Beauvoir, Alain, and Raymond Aron and her often deep and immediate identification with those who suffered—none indicated the eventual development of the strong anti-Judaic elements scattered throughout her writings. Here, I explore Weil’s essays and comments on Judaism and use these writings to assess her identity as a French Jewish female intellectual during the rise of fascism, the Nazi occupation of France, and the genocidal destruction of European Jewry. Although Weil vehemently denies her 60 Rochelle L. Millen Jewishness and develops an extreme devotion to a Gnostic, Platonic formulation of Christianity, her self-hatred manifests a deep resonance with and connection to her Jewish roots. The notion of what constitutes Jewish identity is complex and the contortions of Weil’s religious journey, entangled with the thinking of Nazism, increase that complexity. At the same time, Weil’s often abstract excursus into mysticism, religion, and political philosophy emanate from a particular person, from an unusual mind and sensitive soul embedded in the body of a woman living in the male-dominated world of French, indeed European, intellectual life. As Adrienne Rich writes, Her life and thought will only become clear to us when we begin to ask what it meant to be a woman of her genius and disposition. Her stunning insights into domination and oppression, her self-derogation, her asceticism , her attempts at self-creation, her final self-destruction—all have to be examined in this light.1 Thus, in Weil, Jewishness, gender, and the Holocaust coalesce in an unusual and complicated manner. Weil’s writings reflect a stubborn, fierce independence of mind and heart. Perhaps this is one way to understand her practice of peeling away layers of herself, regarding them as false or defective, and calling attention to the inner, brightly burning flames of high abstraction, focused suffering, and pure spirituality. How else to understand Weil’s belief that regarded both her Jewishness and her femaleness as defects? Such pejorative designations seem to me an internalization of societal norms. In regarding both “women” and “Jews” as Other, Weil’s thinking reflected Nazi ideology. But Weil was foremost determined—always—to be pure subject. In another place and time, her self-abhorrence—the attempt to vilify her cultural and religious roots and to become a noncorporeal spirit—would not have mattered the way it did in the context of the Holocaust. One might also inquire how it is that this self-hating Jew, who refused to be baptized but regarded herself as Catholic, dealt with the silence of the Church and of most of her fellow Christians during the months of Nazi preparation and collaboration in France for the eventual murder of French Jews. Should not the “love of affliction” and the “Jesus of the cross”—both of which she explores with deep feeling—have led to greater Christian compassion for Jewish victims of Nazi round-ups? She had come to Chris- 61 Simone Weil tianity out of deep philosophical conviction and spiritual compatibility and thus was no “ordinary” Christian. Having grown up without the antisemitism embedded in Church teachings, and with her powerful emphasis upon compassion, her capacity for empathy with the victims of Nazism might be assumed to have been greater than that of the usual bystander. But this was not the case: Weil repudiates her Jewishness but does not question the “God of love” of Christianity, even in relation to the Holocaust ’s many Jewish victims. It is ironic that the choices one truly has—to...