Ni réaction, ni révolution. Les intellectuels juifs, la critique du progrès et le scrupule de l’histoire by Julia David (review)

This fervent encyclopedic work will appeal to political scientists and historians, as well as to literary scholars of the twentieth century concerned with poetry, ethics, and Jewish identity. The book’s cover illustration is misleading: none of the thinkers examined remotely resemble a stereotypical old Jewish man with bushy white beard, prayer shawl, book in hand, with a menorah and tablets of the Law. This is, rather, a broad-ranging and sophisticated contribution to the history of secular ideas. Julia David carefully examines, in depth and breadth, philosophical, ideological, and political theories of history and reactions to Enlightenment rationalism, with special attention to the Jewish identity of significant twentieth-century thinkers. The authors treated in depth are Léon (or Lev) Chestov, Benjamin Fondane, Julien Benda, Raymond Aron, George Steiner, and, inevitably, Emmanuel Levinas. David convincingly justifies the historical signifiance of this constellation of French-Jewish thinkers as a worthy parallel to the canonical German-Jewish tradition of Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, Ernst Cassirer, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, and others—all of whom she frequently cites. The French authors demonstrate specific ways of dealing with pessimistic views of history, modernity, and postmodernity. The brief final chapters comprise an essay on thinkers from the Levinas or post-Shoah generation such as Benny Lévy, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Alain Finkielkraut, who accept Jewish identity as an element of themselves as historical actors.

Ni réaction, ni révolution is thus a valuable introduction to the development of Franco-Judaism, before and especially after World War II. As befits an award-winning doctoral thesis at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Scienses Po), Julia David has amassed an exhaustive documentation of primary and secondary sources, with nearly two thousand detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page, numbered consecutively throughout. Readers can develop these resources in a great many directions, including for example as the basis for a systematic study of the Colloques des intellectuels juifs de langue française, which began meeting in 1957. Members of that group exemplify unique qualities of French-Jewish modes of thought, beginning with the Emancipation.

In her book’s long Introduction, David defines the central question of rationalism versus “enthusiasm,” the Aufklärer versus the pessimist, revolution versus reaction, while tracing the historical vicissitudes of the doctrine of mankind’s infinite progress from the French Revolution to the present. The Introduction provides a valuable review of the literature, while concise formulations often help refocus the argument: “Que l’on puisse être ‘démocrate’ sans être ‘progressiste,’ telle fut en réalité la patiente démonstration à laquelle ils s’attelèrent, à rebours des deux tentations dialectiques du XXe siècle, le fanatisme idéologique et la démission nihiliste, le temps cadenassé du dogme et le temps désorienté de la décroyance” (45).

Chapter 1, “Une voix française?” covers the period between the world wars, evoking Rosenzweig, the “fameuse controverse de Davos en 1929” (59), Heidegger, the industrial extermination of the Nazi period, and much more. A major contribution is David’s careful analysis (and, in a way, rehabilitation) of Léon Chestov (né Schwartzmann) and Benjamin Fondane (né Wechsler), two immigrants who effected a shift in French existential thought after the Shoah, developing a critique of rationalism that combines the mythic thought of the Hebrew Bible (Jerusalem) and the philosophy of Athens. The richly documented chapter 2, “Léon Chestov and Benjamin Fondane. La raison des Lumières à l’épreuve” is perhaps the book’s most original contribution. The section titled “Une critique du progressisme des Lumières à rebours du franco-judaïsme” specifies the conflicts within French-Jewish identity, the book’s principal focus.

At this point in the book, David’s analyses become more concise. Chapter 3, “Julien Benda. La raison à l...