Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

16 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 POLITICS AND CULTURE IN JEWISH STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE by Alessandro Guetta Alessandro Guetta holds a doctorate in religious sciences and is a lecturer at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (the School for Higher Studies in Social Sciences) in Paris. His works include a phenomenological study of Italian Judaism (La differenza invisibile: itinerario per teste e immagini tra gli ebrei italiani [Florence: La Giuntina, 1988]) and the forthcoming Entre Hegel et Ie Zohar: la philosophie religieuse d'Elie Benamozegh. ----------------I . Introduction Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God is by now a commonplace of European intellectual discourse. Far lesser has been the posthumous glory of French scholars and thinkers of the same period, whose concerns were hardly far removed from those of the German philosopher. The crisis of religion was experienced just as intensely by them, and the solutions they proposed to it were often characterized by a tone no less prophetic than that employed by the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra. But no Heidegger pored over their works, and thus they have not captivated the interest of theorists trying to describe our complex, fragmented, "postmodern" era. My aim is not merely to acquaint my readers with some forgotten philosophers, as though this were a subject worth delving into for purely academic reasons. Instead, I would urge them to consider the poSSibility that these thinkers, neglected by contemporary historiography , may be far more interesting than might be expected. I admit that compared with the vitality of German philosophy of the last century, the production of French thinkers may appear to be no more than dusty Politics and Culture inJewish Studies in 19th-Century France 17 scholarship. The situation was already stated brilliantly by their contemporary Joseph Ferrari, in his work The Salaried Philosophers: practitioners of philosophy in nineteenth-century France can be seen as wageearners under the tutelage of eclectic philosopher Victor Cousin (17921867 ); they toiled in the service of an official state culture, as they strove to legitimate the political order and safeguard the precarious equilibrium that had been achieved between Church and State.l Moreover , we may fault these philosophers for their prophetic, bombastic style. Nonetheless, the questions they raised and the answers they suggested were of decisive importance. The pages. that follow examine some of these questions and answers as they emerged in a particular discipline: oriental, or more precisely Jewish, studies. In the nineteenth century, to undertake research in that field meant subscribing to specific ideological positions on universalism, freedom, science, progress, the fate of religion, and the separation of humankind into races. The entire set of questions that preoccupied the intellectual world canthus be read within some extremely academic works. My study lays no claim to exhaustivity. It .suggests only one line of inquiry and is based on a limited number of examples, which nonetheless are quite significant.2 II. Universalism In 1892, James Darmesteter published The Prophets of Israel, a series of essays on Judaism, or as he termed it, "Hebraism," by which he meant "Judaism without rituals" [Ie judaisme sans culte].3 Darmesteter -Jewish by background, secular by training and conviction-had by then achieved brilliant success as a scholar of oriental studies. He 'Joseph Ferrari, Les pbilosopbes salaries (Paris, 1849), new ed. by S. Douailler and P. Vermeren (paris: Payot, 1983). [Throughout this article, titles and quotations are translated by me, except when a published English version is cited. -Trans.) 20n this subject, see Perrine Simon-Nahum, La cite irwestie: la "science du judaisme " frarlfais et la republique (paris: Cerf, 1992); and Jean Baumgarten and Shmuel Trigano, ed., "La religion objet de science: la Wissenscbaft des ]udentums," Pardes 19-20 (1994), pp. 25-327. ~James Darmesteter, Les propbetes d'lsraiil (paris, 1892), p. 295. On Darmesteter and his elder brother Arsene, see the recent contribution by Yakov Malkiel, "Les freres Darmesteter et l'aube de la philologie fram;aise," Revue des etudes juives 153 (1994), pp. 383-401. 18 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 had been professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes [School of Advanced Studies] and subsequently occupied the chair of Iranian studies at the...