Christian Delacampagne, Mensch Première Classe

I used to joke with Christian Delacampagne that he should be made an honorary Jew. It was not because he had written about anti-Semitism and the so-called “Jewish question.” Neither was it because he served as cultural attaché to the French Embassy in Tel Aviv. Nor was it because he never forgot to call me and my family with warm greetings for the Jewish New Year and Passover. Christian was what we call a mensch, literally meaning a man or human being in German. But in Yiddish it also meant a very fine person who was exemplary in character: a good egg whose qualities one would hope to encounter in a friend or neighbor. In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten once described a mensch as someone one could admire and emulate, someone of noble character. ¹ That was indeed the kind of man that Christian Delacampagne was. In fact, he could be characterized as what we call menschlickeit, meaning someone of moral rectitude, a person whose qualities make him a fine man. Rabbi Harold Kushner has suggested, “a mensch is not a saint or perfect person but a person from whom all falsehood, all selfishness, all vindictiveness have been burned away so that only a pure [authentic] self remains.”²

You see that even though I often jokingly suggested to Christian that one day he become a bar mitzvah, it wasn’t really necessary, for he already lived his life through the many mitzvah or acts of human kindness that he had accomplished. With this in mind it might be useful to refer to Torah in which definitions of mitzvoh are inscribed. One of the readings of Torah for the Yom Kippur holiday described that day as one of making ultimate choices. “I call heaven and earth as witness this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, both you and your descendants may live.” The Torah is obviously saying something here about freedom and responsibility. Being the mensch that he was enabled Christian to live his life authentically by engaging in an ethical approach to politics on a broad range of moral questions that were secular in nature and that called for living a righteous life. Kindness, benevolence, loyalty, learning to do good deeds were his modus operandi. As a colleague he would never have harmed others who had been unkind to him. As the prophet Hillel said “what is painful to you do not do unto others.” Christian demonstrated a strong inner conviction of what he stood for, but it was never out of a desire to act inauthentically in order to receive the approbation of others.

In much of his writing Christian Delacampagne exemplified the Jewish tradition of tikkun olom (the Hebrew word for rectification) or the need to ameliorate the sometimes infelicitous world in which we live. Throughout his work as a philosopher Christian devoted himself to questions of social justice. He viewed “democracy” as fragile and he saw the role of the intellectual as someone whose mission was to act as the guardian of justice. In The Philosopher and the Tyrant: A Politics of Philosophy he wrote, “I have no read-made morality. Not because I have no values but because the history of our century has abundantly demonstrated the failure of every attempt to plaster unto the reality of action a system of abstract values which inevitably proves empty or false.”³ Although he was constantly engaged in critical speculation, Christian refused to become what Marguerite Duras once described as a “theoretical imbecile.” Forever vigilant before the menacing specter of those who abuse power, he warned us about the possibility of the intellectual becoming violent in his theoretical comportment (violentia, meaning going beyond the limits). Criticizing the totalizing intellectual, Christian believed that such figures forced the world into submission by situating it within a closed system that is impossible to transcend. As he suggests, “at times [these figures] rely on the faces of a tyrant who requires legitimacy that only a philosopher can provide.” The danger, as...