SOURCE: "Julien Benda: Assimilation with Self-Acceptance," in Mirrors of the Jewish Mind: A Gallery of Portraits of European Jewish Writers of Our Time, Thomas Yoseloff, 1968, pp. 52-67.

[Born in Rehlingen, Saar Territory, Kahn is an American educator and writer. In the following excerpt, he considers the influence of Benda's Jewish heritage on his opinions and works.]

Assimilation has been a much overused term in modern Jewish history. Like most such terms it has lost some of its meaning. As generally used it covers a broad range of attitudes which have but few beliefs in common. Assimilation implies a conscious desire to accept all of the ways and modes of the host people, and in the process to abandon, consciously or otherwise, one's ties to the Jewish heritage and people. Andre Maurois, it has been seen, has been silent on those ties. Emmanuel Berl, a lesser known contemporary, has largely rejected them. Julien Benda, one of France's foremost thinkers, has totally embraced the culture of France; very Cartesian and classicist in his thought, his work has been judged one of the most representative expressions of that culture. Yet Benda has retained and even nurtured what measure of Jewishness he sensed in himself.

The wide gap between the assimilationism of Emmanuel Berl and Julien Benda merits comparison. There is little Jewish awareness in Berl. In his many autobiographical works he never stoops to deny his Jewish origins. However, he does appear to look upon them as an evil trick of fate, one which it was futile to counteract. In 1925, he could write about his love for a Christian girl:… "I was perfectly happy to marry a young girl who was not Jewish. I abhor Zionism. I do not even understand this problem, considering myself as I do a Frenchman and a man.… My memory, in any case, does not extend further back than France. And Jerusalem evokes in me, above all, verses by Racine." In fact, Berl continues—after noting he was glad that Christiane, his girl, was Catholic—"I suffered from not belonging to any communion; for me the Synagogue was not one. I deplored seeing evaporate, for lack of a solid frame, the religious feeling which sometimes seemed to surge within me.…

French in his political and cultural outlook, young Berl's religious yearnings—and they were few and spasmodic—turned toward Catholicism. He had grown up very Parisian, very sophisticated, with a Voltairian, irreligious upbringing that shied away from even the most simple of Jewish observances. Deprived in his youth of even a smattering of Jewish knowledge, and of any of those affective associations that are formed by habit, Berl appeased his later religious craving with an occasional and faint move toward the more accessible Church. Perhaps it was only the experience of Hitler which made him wish in 1952 that he had partaken in his youth of those great religious festivals "which shine with a quiet splendor in the memory of my co-religionists." Now, in the autumn of his life, after the shattering years of occupation, Berl describes with warmth and emotion the customs and rites of the holidays he missed.

But even after the liberation, Berl's distance from any position readily understandible to Jews was considerable. One can still comprehend his wholehearted endorsement of the Munich Pact: Berl put his concern for humanity and peace above democratic loyalty and dread of Nazi expansion. But when his close friend and editorial associate, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle (1893-1945), became the Rosenberg—if not the Streicher—of France, Berl's failure to break with him became incomprehensible. With the collaborationist on trial after Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, all that Berl could say was that Drieu's antiSemitism, even in pre-war years, had sometimes been annoying to him. Since Hitler, Berl wrote, all anti-Semitism had become intolerable to him, that of Drieu not excluded. This detached view of a social disease that had cost so many lives permitted him to continue his relations with Drieu even after the vitriolic, racist pamphlets had appeared. Berl records this reaction, odd, to say the least: "How I would have liked to have it out with him, but it was already done." In Prise de sang (Blood Test) written after Drieu's trial and suicide, Berl strove hard to rehabilitate the antiSemite's reputation. If this speaks well for Berl, the friend, it is a sad commentary on the humanity to which he professed loyalty.

But then, had Berl grasped the character and ravages of antiSemitism? In 1925 he expressed himself in terms which clearly presaged his stand on the Drieu affair. Meditations sur un amour defunt (Reflections on a Dead Love) features a curious scapegoat theory in reverse. The worst effects of anti-Semitism, Berl held, was the excessive credence which Jews displayed toward it. Belief in antiSemitism is the Jew's way of covering up personal inadequacies. "A Jew who is not invited to dinner believes that he would have been invited, were he not a Jew. A Jew, when someone shouts 'dirty Jew,' imagines that nothing would be said to him, were he not a Jew." Berl recalls a significant childhood experience. He was walking with his parents through an Algerian street when some rabblerousers shouted Mort aux Juifs ("Death to the Jews"). Characteristically, Berl summarizes the experience as follows: "It wasn't the word 'Jews' which concerned me, but the word 'death.'"

Despite a softening in attitude toward his origins in the post-war years, Berl has on the whole looked upon the Jew as a Frenchman: not a Jewish Frenchman, but with the detachment of just any Frenchman. He remains the epitome of the fully assimilated Jew for whom "Jerusalem evokes only the verses of Racine."

Jerusalem evoked more, substantially more, for Julien Benda, one of the most controversial theorists of the intellectual's role in society. Benda was a much embattled man. At the time of his death in 1956, he had alienated much of the world which had once admired him. To some he appeared a heartless rationalist with little regard for the emotional makeup of people; to others he seemed intolerant and vicious toward those holding views distinct from his own. Little doubt that the philosopher's peculiar brand of unorthodoxy had the ill-starred quality of exasperating both sides of a question. He offended French nationalists by his determined espousal of Europeanism; he irritated internationalists with his venomous and often unreasoned anti-Germanism. French traditionalists never ceased to abuse him, but liberals also—especially after Belphdgor—voiced their displeasure. On most every question Benda's position was so rigidly independent that concurrence on broad points seldom signified approval of specifics. Benda had a predilection for dramatizing himself, often appearing ludicrous in the process. Finally, his fellow-intellectuals resented the strain which Benda's concept of le clerc (the cleric or monk) imposed on them. This concept has often been misinterpreted to mean that Benda wanted the intellectual to withdraw from the affairs of his time. Actually, Benda did not argue against participation as such, but that in participating the intellectual must remain an intellectual, considering issues from the standpoint of abstract truth and justice.

Benda, the cleric, worshipped at numerous shrines. He was a rapt member of the cult of intelligence, often mirrored in a Spinozan rationalism. He embraced with fervor the values of truth, justice and logic. He placed the scientific spirit considerably above the artistic frame of mind. He adhered to a "fixist," eternalist philosophy which required a strongly affirmative viewpoint. Methodologically, his "religion" revolved about the "dissociation of ideas," the love of systematization, the tendency to abstract thinking. He revered the memory of Spinoza, Descartes and Renouvier; he detested and battled against Bergsonism, Pragmatism and later Existentialism. Because the sentimental internationalism of Romain Rolland offended his calm rationalism, he bitterly fought it, although he was in sympathy with its overall objective. So rigid was Benda in the pursuit of his various "religions" that he was often accused of striking an intellectual pose.

Benda's Jewish attitudes should be viewed against the background of these intellectual tenets. A man with so many religions may not have a religion. Indeed, Julien Benda was never a Jew by religion. The Jewishness that was ingrained in him—and it was limited—was due to his sense of cultural and historical pride: partly the reaction to anti-Semitism, somewhat less by temperament, and very slightly by habit. Benda's writings were never chiefly concerned with Jewish themes, but he occasionally alluded to his Jewish heritage, commented on questions of Jewish interest, labeled his actions and thoughts as part of a Jewish mentality. Again and again he voiced an abiding affection and even admiration for the Jewish past. In fact, some of his superlatives concerning the Jewish record have been so un-Bendalike as to expose him to the charge of ethnocentrism, casting a long shadow of suspicion over his vaunted rationalism and sincerity.

The philosopher's thoughts on Jewish matters are found mostly in the autobiographical La Jeunesse d'un clerc (The Youth of an Intellectual), Un Régulier dans le siècle (A Regulator of the Century) and in Chapter VII of Le Rapport d'Uriel (Uriel's Report). His observations range from social and political issues to the character of antiSemitism, from the meaning of the Jewish message to a description of classes and types of Jews.

Benda's childhood in a Parisian Jewish home of the 1870's was largely representative of the time and the place. He observed no Jewish ritual, being completely severed from all Jewish tradition, and for that matter all religious thought. In the years to come, this Voltairian climate sealed off his mind from even comprehending religious sentiment or emotion. The author recalls as his sole bit of religious instruction the negative lesson of being asked not to mock Catholic children walking to confession. The emancipated Bendas had little regard for Jewish culture and learning, which they judged primitive and even barbaric.

On the other hand, their sociopolitical thinking was largely governed by the fact of Jewishness. Thus, Benda's calm, impractical father—to whom he was more attached than to his lively, Parisian mother—kept eulogizing the French Revolution, which had freed the Jew and granted him civil rights. In fact, Camille Benda was wont to express dismay that there should be Jews who were not in accord with the Revolution or opposed to its achievements. Julien Benda asserts that the strong patriotism of French Jews of his father's generation could be traced back to their attachment to revolutionary ideas and the gratitude they felt toward these ideas. Jewish patriotism—including Benda's own—was different from that of other Frenchmen, because according to Benda it tended to stress the substance and meaning of the nation rather than the forms and symbols. It was equally distant from flags and uniforms on the one side and nationalist notions of earth, blood and instinct on the other. Instead, Jewish patriotism underscored appreciation of the values of liberty, equality and fraternity.

From his family Benda also gleaned the sources of Jewish ambition. Benda believed that devotion to the young and the full realization of their abilities had always been traditional in Jewish families. With the older generation having failed to produce the Messiah, all hope had to be centered on the younger one. But in the nineteenth century, for the first time, other factors entered into Jewish ambition. For the first time Jewish pride, individuality and self-esteem were given a chance to assert themselves. As though the restraints and humiliations of centuries were suddenly to be swept away with one mighty effort, Jews threw themselves headlong into the new careers open to them. What a challenge to disprove the old contention of Jewish inferiority! Benda recalls that, especially in bourgeois families, children were prodded into academic competition to demonstrate they could be first-rate people if they were only given a chance. They were to display at once their immense capacity for work and their intellectual endowment. As models to emulate, Jewish parents held up the Reinach brothers, who had walked off with every academic prize the French Academy could bestow. But in encouraging their children to exceptional effort, parents may have made a serious error. The Reinachs' triumphs, widely publicized, always struck Benda as one of the latent causes for the virulent anti-Semitism of the close of the century. In characteristically cynical fashion Benda wrote that justice may have demanded that the Reinachs receive all prizes, but political interest—and the self-interest of Jews—required that they receive only some. Benda himself was only a mediocre student, preferring other diversions to those of books. He claimed to have been intractable to his parents' entreaties and up to the time of his death was still resentful when Jews, as Jews, told him they were proud of him and his books.

Benda was to remember yet another intellectual condition peculiar to the Jews of his time. They knew but two political organisms, the individual and the state, with all linking bodies outside their mental orbit. Benda believed this a Jewish tendency because, as Jews, they thought of the social in a rational and abstract manner—as distinct from the concrete and historical thinking of others, which revolved about such institutions as church and army. Here again, Benda conceived of the Jews as steeped in the spirit of the Revolution, with its a priori, idealistic notions.

In his later years Benda was to claim that it was his parents, without deep roots in the soil of France, who unwittingly set the stage for his own non-historical thinking. Despite their fervent love for France, they did not instill in him a conscious respect for the whole of the French tradition. Undoubtedly, Benda surmised, their own past in France was too recent to lend any genuine meaning to a history-centered patriotism. Nor did his parents, as did non-Jewish parents, bind him to religious traditions or even moral teachings. Finally, his parents removed him from the continuum of history by failing to raise him in any particularist tradition, allowing for a universal rather than specific moral outlook. Benda later wondered about the influences which would explain his cult for values based on an eternal frame of reference and his aversion for those who would only consider them from an historical and transient viewpoint. "I am wondering if the true explanation resides not in the education [given him by his parents] and if God would not have recognized the author of La Trahison des clercs [Betrayal of the Intellectuals] in this little boy seated at the table between two adults who were praising the beauties of reason, work and science and never the particularities of his nation, ancestors and people."

If one is to believe Benda, the absence of firmly linked chains to the past was thus helpful in developing the individuality of his thought and did not harm him in his condition of being a Jew. Benda declared categorically that he was never at war with himself or with the Jew in him. There was, of course, only a limited Jewishness with which to reconcile other identities. But, in any case, and for whatever reason, he succeeded uncannily well in accepting himself as he saw himself. "I accepted my mathematical bent of mind, my Greco-Roman culture, my Jewish mentality with what limitations and non-inclusiveness these necessarily entail for a true understanding of the world and my feeling of solidarity with Man. I accepted the fact of my pure intellectuality [ma nature de pur intellectuel] with what it inevitably lacks in terms of loyal devotion, my love of the idea with what it suggests of the anti-social. I have accepted to be what I am and, above all, not to be what I am not."

Yet while accepting his Jewishness and even making some extraordinary claims for Jews, Benda was continually exasperated with some types of Jews. In his early years, he had often encountered le snobisme des grands Juifs and had little use for it; later he was to endure an equal aversion in the presence of strongly conscious or militant Jews who, he knew quite well, returned the compliment. Benda's religions would not tolerate traditionalist Jews, as they excluded traditionalists of any party or faith. His anti-particularism was also responsible for his scoffing at Zionism as a Jewish racism. Basically he regarded himself among lesjuifs affranchis, the assimilated Jews; although he was acutely yet painlessly aware they were detested by Jews and non-Jews alike.

Benda belongs to that rare species of Jewish writer who did not encounter until full manhood the phenomenon of anti-Semitism. To believe him, he did not recognize it until, at thirty, the Dreyfus Case suddenly and pungently drove home its meaning. But once familiar with it, he was never again to underestimate it. He relates in some detail an experience in prejudice. His novel L'Ordination had been presented to the Goncourt Academy (named after the Goncourt Brothers, whose name is tainted with anti-Semitism) for its annual prize—one of the most highly esteemed literary awards in France. Benda asserted that it was because of the anti-Jewish sentiment of two key members that the coveted prize was denied him on a late ballot. Paradoxically, this defeat marked the turn in his literary fortunes. Following this incident, after long years of relative obscurity, he found the doors of the publishing houses wide open to him. One may question the full accuracy of Benda's report and allegations, but one cannot doubt his sincerity when he wrote: "The hatred for Jews is one of the rare philosophies which, in this so strongly divided mankind, receives almost unanimous support."

Benda's reasoning here is externalized in Le Rapport d'Uriel, a work written in the mock-innocent, mildly satiric vein of Montesquieu's Persian Letters and some of Voltaire's short novels. Here Benda differentiates between conscious and subliminal charges against Jews. Among the voiced prejudices Benda lists first those coming under the heading of Jewish capitalism—i.e., theft, usury, exploitation, avarice—all at the expenses of the Christian masses and, especially, Christian workers. The second is that of Jew-based communism, an accusation entirely the antithesis of the former—but, adds Benda, in logic only. In emotion and passion, he maintains, they are one, with both striving to make the Jew odious. The third complaint he labels imperialism, a theory according to which the Jews care only for their own, have no love for the host nation, yet seek high office and power in it to gain control on behalf of the "chosen" people.

Benda's refutation of these accusations is more angry than original. It is interesting only in relation to the claims advanced for Jews. They are especially honest in business; they have a congenital fanaticism for justice which sometimes causes them to appear revolutionary. Jews above all others conceive commands of human conscience outside of the prejudices of historical and national factors and, more than others, treat them in their universal, absolute quality. Jews honor moral values in their eternal, everlasting aspects, independent of time and place and are thus an eminent factor of human liberation. In Benda's persistent equating of Jewish characteristics and values with those he espoused, one may indeed discern a considerable identification with things Jewish. He carried this identification further when he declared that, like himself, Jews have disdain for terrestial grandeur and—again like him—have a cult for the spiritually pure, and for rational intelligence. He quotes from the Psalms: "Other nations have their chariots and gilded arms; you, 0 Israel, you have your God."

In his exposition of hidden, "unconscious" reasons for anti-Semitism, Benda anticipated some of the psychological theories of prejudice which have come to hold sway in the United States in recent years. Benda realized that there were historical facts in the Jewish situation that were responsible for a particular brand of prejudice. But he astutely recognized that anti-Semitism, like all prejudice, would germinate mostly in those already predisposed for it. There were some who conferred upon themselves a certain superiority and primacy by despising others. By despising the Jew, by speaking and agitating against him, they bestowed upon themselves a patrician title, and also the ability, wealth and other status factors which they were actually lacking. "There seems to be a permanent element in the disdain for the Jew," he concludes, and adds these additional subliminal causes for the perennial disease: scapegoating, especially after a lost war; the need in many humans to discredit social justice and democratic ideals which they associate with the Jew (or does Benda?); the need of those governing to employ diversionary maneuvers when in difficulty.

Benda was no pacifist and strongly approved an army that would truly be in the service of a democratic republic. But the Dreyfus Affair apparently conditioned him forever against the military and the authoritarianism it represented. As a result, he was prone to equate anti-Semitism with the military, and his other personal philosophic and social villains, just as he had linked the Jews to his positive virtues. Benda predicted that anti-Semitism would rise and fall with the growth and decline of militarism. Conversely, he seemed to think the Jews would become apostles of a truly civil society because they were civil par excellence. This new society would opt for justice, human dignity, and the rights of the most humble. Above all, it would deny to any man the right to make a tool of another. Writing during the Nazi occupation, Benda pondered over the possible triumph of the military system and its effects upon Jewish survival. Any succeeding civil society, he feared, might come about only in time to honor the memory of the Jews.

In those gloomy days of World War II, spent in solitary exile in Carcassonne, writing book upon book, Benda appears to have moved somewhat closer to Judaism. Souvenirs d'un enterre vif (Memories of One Buried Alive), written when Benda was well over seventy, contains several passages in which he relates more than ever his values to those of Jews. Above all, he had discovered the Prophets and experienced for them a depth of sympathy which he had previously accorded to only a few religious writers—and these latter he now recognized as the spiritual heirs of the Prophets. The Prophets endowed him with a sentiment he had never known before: veneration for the people which had produced the Prophets and had thus borne into the world the idea of morality. It was their teaching and their message which the detractors of the Jews had always sought to stamp out. More than ever he conceived of the Jews as the representatives of the critical spirit in modern times; for less deeply mired in the nationalist ideas of blood and soil, they could interpret a problem more freely and independently. Now, too, he imputed to his "race" a special capacity for reflection and thought. He could only concur with the dictators of the thirties who had declared that "To think is to be Jewish." While Benda would not carry this notion to the extreme of claiming intellectuality for all Jews, or that they have a monopoly on it (he specifically denied this), he nevertheless credited them with a specificity in this area. He cited the disproportionate number of eminent Jewish scientists, philosophers, and men of letters. In his attic room, hidden away in safety, the aging philosopher was so overcome by compassion that he allowed his objectivity to forsake him. He imputed to Jews a virtual monopoly on justice. His statements were almost surely the result of powerful emotional reaction to the horrors outside his room. For an assimilated Jew, European and citizen of the world, a universalist rather than particularist thinker, his war-time statements suggest deeper attachment for the Jewish heritage than might have been expected.

Despite his mounting claims for the Jew and his heritage, Benda came closer to neither traditional Judaism nor Zionism. Here his Weltanschauung was in deadly conflict with either the irrational mysticism of the former and the politically oriented nationalism of the latter. The proclamation of Israel as a state evoked both traditional Judaism and Zionism, both areas in which he brooked no compromise.

Some critics have seen in Benda's isolation, his quarrelsomeness, his fundamental pessimism, less the result of reasoned intellectual conviction than of his personal and social heritage as a Jew. Some have even suspected the very concept of the cleric's role as a contemplative figure, apart from partisan strife, as a rationalization of his personal background. But it appears doubtful that this personal factor operated more potently in Benda's thinking than in that of other contemporaries. Benda, to be sure, saw himself as a Jew, but never exclusively as a Jew and certainly not even primarily as a Jew. The complete ease with which his family associated with Catholics in his youth, the perfectly natural manner in which he came to view such contacts, the absence of mainly Jewish associations, his ability to move in all Jewish circles but the most militant and nationalist make the hypothesis of an exceptional personal factor highly untenable. His intellectual formation had multiple origins and they all combined to shape the cleric that was Benda.

History is likely to remember Benda's plan for calm, detached reasoning, for the subordination of emotion to the intellect, for the quest for lasting values. All have struck a clear if unheeded note in a world gone awry with propaganda and emotive appeals to the human ear. History will also record his name for his persistent admonitions to intellectuals not to commit "treason" by over-valuing the temporal, by aspiring to power, influence, and prestige and thus neglect the truly clerical functions of searching for truth and justice. History will certainly not remember Benda as a Jew, for his Jewishness, though real, was minor and undistinguished. It cannot forget, however, the contribution which his Jewish background and the ethical values inherent in it added to his overall thinking. Benda was that rare species, the assimilated Jew, who yet fully accepted himself as a Jew.