We Spring from that History: Bernard Lazare, between Universalism and Particularism

Joel Swanson

doi:10.3390/rel9100322

Abstract

This paper examines the evolution of Jewish identity in the works of writer and critic Bernard Lazare. It suggests that Lazare’s oeuvre elucidates one of the central tensions in modern Jewish thought: the division between those thinkers who use the reputedly universalist Greek philosophical tradition as a lens to analyze and critique Judaism, and those who use the Jewish textual tradition to challenge and reconceive non-Jewish philosophy. Lazare situated himself on both sides of this divide during his life. In his early work, he used the universalist, laical ideology of French republicanism to attack what he perceived as the inflexible, regressive, anti-modernist character of Talmudic Judaism. Lazare’s thought later shifted in the wake of his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair, and he sought to reclaim an ethnic, nationalist conception of Jewish identity as the source for a communal Jewish political response to rising anti-Semitism. Yet through a close reading of Lazare’s writings, the paper suggests that Lazare’s intellectual evolution was never as complete or totalizing as he perhaps wished. His earlier work occasionally used Jewish sources to critique philosophical universalism, while hints of philosophical critiques of the particularism of Jewish texts such as the Talmud remained in his later revalorization of Jewish identity. Lazare thereby reveals how universalism and particularism remain mutually implicated within modern Jewish thought. The paper thus suggests avenues for Lazare to be productively read within the broader canon of modern Jewish thinkers.

Highlights

Jewish Thought between Athens and JerusalemIn his panegyric to his master Jacob Gordin (1896–1947), the influential Algerian-born FrenchJewish rabbi Léon Askénazi (1922–1996) wrote that one of Gordin’s greatest innovations for modernJewish thought was to use Judaism as a lens to judge the modern world for the first time, rather than judging Judaism on the basis of the ethical and cultural standards of modernity
Because of the fact that European Jews first encountered modernity, and the philosophical presuppositions underpinning it, at a time when their political and social status was in rapid flux and when debates over “the Jewish question” occupied the European polity in a diverse array of locales, modern Jewish thought was “often guided by an apologetic motive” (Mendes-Flohr 2005, p. 736), as Jewish thinkers attempted to justify the continued survival of Judaism within the modern world, and to demonstrate how the particularism of Jewish law could coexist within a modern universal, secular concept of citizenship
Lazare began by submitting the Jewish tradition to the reputedly universalist philosophical standards of modernity, and he judged Talmudic and rabbinic. Judaism harshly upon these standards. Later in his life the psychological shock of the Dreyfus Affair reoriented his relationship to his own Jewish heritage, and he began to use the particularism of Jewish culture and Jewish literary sources to construct a new model of international socialist universalism

Summary

Introduction

In his panegyric to his master Jacob Gordin (1896–1947), the influential Algerian-born French. By using Jewish sources to question and critique philosophy, we would come to see that the philosophical tradition that calls itself universalist, which believes that its truths can be reached by any human being in any cultural context through the faculty of reason alone, is merely its own particular, a particular rooted in the contingent Greek and Christian heritage of Europe. Modern Jewish thought, may perhaps be categorized on a continuum of whether it submits Jewish tradition to the external judgment of abstract philosophical universalism, or whether it begins with Jewish particularism and uses this particularity as the grounds for a new model of universalism that decenters the priority of the Greco-Christian tradition It is within this intellectual dichotomy that we may read the works of the little studied late-19th and early-20th century Jewish writer Bernard Lazare (1865–1903), a writer situated precisely on the knife-edge between these two intellectual approaches. Lazare’s oeuvre provides a lens to examine how the ghosts of the putatively universalist, Greco-Christian philosophical critique of Judaism continue to haunt even those Jewish thinkers who attempt to reach beyond it

Background

Conclusions