On the Horizon: Jewish Culture in Western Europe
David Scheinert
This department—which reports on cultural and social trends and events—presents this month a discussion by Benno Weiser of the implications of a South American country's reaction to the film Gentleman's
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Commentary Magazine
This department—which reports on cultural and social trends and events—presents this month a discussion by Benno Weiser of the implications of a South American country’s reaction to the film Gentleman’s Agreement, a matter which has broader significance, perhaps, in view of similar doubts expressed over the showing of the film in Europe; and a survey by David Scheinert of Jewish cultural activity in Western Europe. Mr. Weiser, formerly a well-known newspaper columnist in Ecuador, is now with the Latin American department of the Jewish Agency. Mr. Scheinert is a young Belgian critic and novelist. Mr. Weiser’s article has been translated from German by Francis C. Golfing, Mr. Scheinert’s from French by Irving Kristol.

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What is the situation of Jewish culture in Europe since the war? To begin with, its center, which for decades was in Eastern Europe, has been displaced: it is in the countries of Western Europe that it is struggling to come back to life. But after a liberation that turned out differently from what was hoped (yet which grants the Jews the free expression of their bereavement), material difficulties and the need to bring order to one’s ideas, to classify events and amass documents and testimony, created a climate not very propitious—especially in Jewish milieux—for the growth of disinterested ideas. The collective source was exhausted by the enfeeblement and atomization of the Jewish communities. People seemed sluggish and sleepy; there was no sign of activity. Little by little, however, the elements in the new situation took on some order. One got used to one’s losses, and suppressed spiritual needs began to free themselves and seek out new perspectives.

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I will discuss some aspects of the modest renaissance of Jewish culture in Western Europe because it is there, and especially in France, that there seems to survive the ultimate determination not to abdicate. In Holland and Switzerland, as well as France, there are noteworthy signs of effort. With regard to Belgium, there is not much to say: the numerical weakness of the indigenous Jews, their suspicion of anything that looks like material or intellectual autonomy, the existence of clans whose only ambition is to believe themselves the navel of the universe, the transient character of the Jewish refugees living there, the instability, incompetence, and even occasional dishonesty of the professional leaders—these are the factors that have hindered any cultural endeavor. La Revue Juive de Belgique—which I founded in 1945 out of my own pocket and which was forced to cease publication after one year for lack of funds—is only one exception that proves the law of general inertia.

It is, however, in Belgium that I came to know four men remarkable in different respects: Professor Samé Katzenellenbogen-deceased after the war—who taught Hebrew at the Institut des Hautes Etudes, who did so much for Hebrew culture, and whose Slavic accent I shall never forget, as well as his careless appearance and exuberant good nature extinguished forever by the German occupation. Rabbi David Berman, in striking contrast, small, timid, dressed in black, his beard carefully trimmed, a sort of combination of liberal rabbi and Protestant pastor, timidly existing within the interior of Judaism but battling outside for a God without reproach, and who found a strange death in 1947. Izak Prins, Dutchman, a creature at once Hoffmanesque, Rabelaisian, and Shakespearean, pious and racy, a formidably erudite archivist as much interested in patronymics and oaths as in Jewish peddlers; he has bequeathed to Palestine, where he now lives, the mass of precious documents that he collected in Europe. And finally, my friend Siegfried Van Praag, a Dutchman who lives in Brussels, and whose creative ability marks him as one of the great European Jewish writers. If he has made no gaudy innovations in literary technique, he has in many works given a unified vision of the Jewish people that brings him near to a Zangwill or a Franzos. That which sets him apart from them is that he has tried, successfully, to present in his work not so much the exoticism of the Jews—transforming them into inhabitants of a menagerie—as their humanity impregnated with their inhuman condition. His interest has been directed also toward the carnal underside of life—a rare phenomenon in a Jewish writer.

The figure of Van Praag supplies a natural excuse for me to turn to Holland, where all his books have appeared. His article on Dutch Jewry published in the October issue of Commentary expresses, better than I could hope to, the prevailing nostalgia for the peaceful prosperity of the yishuv in Holland with its intense cultural life, and the sorrow at the ravages of Nazism. The Jews of this small country, greatly reduced in numbers, have nevertheless drawn from their impressive and always vivacious traditions, their instinct for efficiency and coordination, the means to rebuild in miniature that which was destroyed on a large scale. The results demand respect: a Jewish publishing house (Joachimsthal); a weekly magazine of Zionist tendency and some intellectual worth (De Nieuw Israelitisch Weekblad); another that is more strictly political (De Joodsche Wachter); a Revue Mensuelle pour l’Histoire des Juifs de Hollande directed by Jaap Meyer; some writers, especially those of the older generation who are still productive, and above whom stands out, as I have said, Van Praag, who deserves to be known beyond the borders of the Low Countries.

When one turns to Swiss Judaism, one thinks immediately of Josué Jéhouda with his curious penchant for a rootless propheticism, and who has tenaciously kept alive in Geneva, for many years and under difficult conditions, a Revue Juive which, despite its flagrant inadequacies, keeps the Jewish note vibrating. This review suffers from a spiritual incontinence. It is the center of a group of men who would like to diffuse a stream of temperate love: the malady of tolérantisme, a congenital weakness which is not, alas, contagious. Among those affected by it are Jéhouda and his pious partisans, and, in France, the old Parisian, Edmond Fleg, and the young Marseillais, Emmanuel Eydoux. It is comforting to acknowledge, on the other hand, that on the edge of this mainstream, but showing up boldly in the Revue Juive in the little space allotted to it, there can be found more vigorous ideas. There is perhaps something symbolic in the fact that the son of Josué Jéhouda, Daniel, seems to separate himself from the paternal doctrine and turns, not to mirages, but to a reality which demands more and gives more in return. Josué J6houda also directs, at Editions de la Baconniére, a collection, “Israel et le Monde.” It is an Israel high in the clouds and far from the world, far from an authentic propheticism with its violence and thick rasping breath.

Among the youth, there is only one name to mention, that of Jean Starobinski, who has distinguished himself by an essay on Kafka.

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Each country seems to have marked the Judaism that inhabited it with its own characteristics. Little or no support for culture in Belgium. A sense of organization from which there is not always absent a certain timidity in Holland. A facile idealism, occasionally a bit hypocritical, in Switzerland.

In France, Jewish culture is marked by diversity, audacity, and disorder. It is a little-known culture, born at the end of the 19th century. Of the old guard, there are few who are still producing. Edmond Fleg, badly wounded during the war as a man, has not, as a thinker, renounced his optimism or regretted his tolerance. He pursues serenely his neo-biblicism, less defeatist than the neo- Christianity of Sholem Asch. The octogenarian André Spire writes little, but his ardor is not dead, and his Poèmes Juifs are not forgotten. Albert Cohen, an extraordinary writer, is in London, and has not published anything since Mangeclous, which appeared before the war. Henri Hertz, companion of Apollinaire and Max Jacob, has detached himself from his precious funambulistic poetry, his disenchanted unrealism, and has turned to the writing of essays that are distinctly “engagé.” Armand Lunel, novelist of the Jews of Provence, has abandoned them. Finbert continues to seek in nomadism the true vocation of Israel, the purification of man through contact with the flock and the absolute. His Semites are more often Arabs than Jews, and are real enough. There is in his work more pure air, earth, plants, and animals than can be generally found in Jewish books, in which life simmers between four walls. Milbauer, the poet of the tormented mask and the jeering remark, published his latest collection of French verse in Palestine—Chants Orbes: the suffering of mankind, which he makes his own; solitude imprisoned in the heart of this solidarity like a bitter pit; a tired irony.

The younger generation does not give cause to forget the older. True, it is full of promise, but the fruits are small. It seems poorer in sap than its predecessor. No violent or mature work, no flash of lightning, no vast enterprise, no grandiose intentions. Arnold Mandel has written an acidly lucid essay on psychology, and a very thin collection of bitter prose poems that I find a little bare. Rabinovitch, up to now, has published only some essays in which he reveals the instability of so many young Jewish intellectuals of the Diaspora with a sincerity that, in contrast to Mandel’s, seems weakboned. Emmanuel Eydoux, whose name I have already mentioned, poses religious problems for himself and attempts to solve them in a Biblical atmosphere even simpler than that of Fleg’s, but, to my mind, just as unusable. His style lacks neither breath nor grandeur, but it is white and without blood-cells; literary themes, like others, cannot live only on (divine) love and fresh air. Léon Aréga has written a book, Comme Si C’était Fini, on the life of a Jewish prisoner of war in German prison camps, and his escapes. It is the story of a man twice defeated (as Jew and as Frenchman), and the style, despite its dryness, is effective. In his writing, as in Mandel’s and Rabinovitch’s, there is something spiritless, without hope, like the lines of a prison. Is this the legacy of Kafka (who also seems to be fermenting in the work of Camus)?

The magazines are born and die; objective conditions are unfavorable, and financial support is lacking. Hillel, journal of the World Union of Jewish Students, has published some interesting studies. There is also: Aleph, of which only one number has appeared, devoted to justice and charity; and two weeklies, La Riposte, organ of the Hebrew Movement for Liberation, and La Terre Retrouvée, which reflects the thinking of the Jewish Agency. While the first defends the national integrity with unblemished violence, the second continues in the rather sterile tradition of practical Zionism, There are a few other journals of little importance.

A publishing house, Editions du Chant Nouveau, has published a series of instructive, and sometimes edifying, books. Editions de la Terre Retrouv6e specializes in the publication of works more particularly Zionist, a few of them worthwhile. A troupe of young comedians, “Les Compagnons de l’Arche,” has given several performances-notably The Dybbuk and La Colline de la Vie (Tel-Hai)—which earned a quick success; plenty of good intentions, but nothing new.

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The postwar years do not appear to have set free in Europe any genius, any master or guide. There is no spiritual movement of importance; no group or prophet to gather the mass behind them. No new Hasidism, no new Haskalah. No Borochov, Gordon, or Jabotinsky. The people have been decimated. The young are undecided or carried away by the will to act, are drawn toward an immediate goal or do not know which path to choose. However, all fermentation is not dead, and if a cultural upsurge that would seize the mass of Jews is impossible—because the mass does not exist and those who remain want to get out—nevertheless I believe in the possible, and not too distant, birth of some solitary figure who, like Kafka for example, will hurl across the universe the Jewish Word, whose echo will make itself heard after a passage of time.

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