The Starobinsky Family

Starobin is today a modest town in the Minsk region, south of Sloutsk. In the nineteenth century, it belonged to the Pale of Settlement, that vast territorial reserve where the Russian Empire confined its Jewish subjects. Like hundreds of other Belarusian towns, it was home to a large Jewish community, often the majority in the urban fabric itself. The imperial census of 1897 confirms the extent of this presence: across the country, Jews constituted then in all the cities and villages of Belarus a significant share of the population, and their population in Belarus continued to grow: they numbered 725,548 in 1897.

From this community, the Starobinsky lineage takes its name. The toponymic patronymic in -ski designating someone from the shtetl of Starobin reflects a well-attested mechanism: in the culture of towns, the individual was first defined by his community of origin, and the place name became a sign of identity once it was borne elsewhere. Recent historical research has considerably renewed our image of these towns. Far from miserable or nostalgic clichés, the shtetl was, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a dense and active economic organism [Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl]. It was a world of craftsmen, merchants, peddlers and scholars, where market economy was articulated with an intense religious and communal life [Antony Polonsky, Polin, vol. 17 — The Shtetl: Myth and Reality].

This economy possessed an ethical dimension. Talmudic tradition commanded that the community provide for the poor, endow orphan girls, ransom captives, support the melamed and the physician. The shtetl thus functioned as a matrix of tsedaka — that justice-charity which, in Jewish thought, is not voluntary alms but an obligation of law. The Jewish town of Poland and Belarus was, in its daily reality, the place where religious tradition and the first seeds of modernity were transmitted together [Rachel Ertel, Le Shtetl. La bourgade juive de Pologne, de la tradition à la modernité]. It is in this balance between study, work and care for others that the Starobinsky lineage takes root, even though the names of its members for this century remain, in the state of accessible archives, unknown to us.

Locating the Starobinsky lineage in the region of Minsk and Sloutsk is to inscribe them within a precise space of Jewish spiritual geography: historical Lithuania, homeland of mitnaged Judaism, adversary of Hasidism and uncompromising guardian of the primacy of study. Sloutsk itself was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a renowned center of talmudic life, endowed with a leading yeshiva. In this universe, a man's dignity was measured less by his fortune than by his mastery of Torah, and the learned pauper surpassed, in the hierarchy of values, the ignorant merchant.

This ethos takes root in the long history of medieval Ashkenaz, whose contemporary scholarship has demonstrated the intellectual depth. The rabbinic culture of medieval Ashkenaz was a learned enterprise of exceptional continuity, in which the study of Talmud and the elaboration of halakha structured both thought and social life [Ephraim Kanarfogel, The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz]. Piety there was not a matter of speculation alone, but of concrete observance, woven into the daily life of men and women [Elisheva Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz]. Communities constituted themselves around the sacred, making fidelity to the Law the cement of collective bonds [Jeffrey R. Woolf, The Fabric of Religious Life in Medieval Ashkenaz].

From this long chain, the Lite of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the rigorous heir. The intellectual world perpetuated there had known how, across the centuries, to adapt halakhic writing to the mutations of societies — as shown by the course of Jewish legal thought from one center to another across Europe [Maoz Kahana, From Prague to Pressburg], and as attested by the great syntheses of Ashkenazi rabbinic history [Haym Soloveitchik, Collected Essays, Volume II]. It is this cult of study — this conviction that to scrutinize a text is a form of prayer — that the Starobinsky lineage received as inheritance. One cannot know, for lack of nominative archives, whether its ancestors were rabbis, merchants, or artisans; but the milieu that formed them made of intelligence a virtue, and this disposition would, in its descendants, find new objects without changing in nature.

The first member of the lineage that the archive restores to us with clarity is Aron Starobinski. Born in 1893, he embodies the threshold generation: that which, born within the orbit of the traditional world, chose the path of modern studies and, for that reason, had to go into exile. The cause of this departure is a documented and painful historical fact: the numerus clausus and the antisemitic prohibitions that closed the universities of the Russian Empire to Jews. In 1913, Aron Starobinski, father of Jean, emigrated young and alone to Geneva, because the University of Warsaw did not allow the Jew in him to enroll in the faculty of medicine. The family, as Geneva sources report it, descended from Polish Jews who had fled the antisemitic laws forbidding them access to medical studies.

The itinerary is that of thousands of young Jews from the Pale of Settlement who, in the Belle Époque, made their way to Swiss, German or French universities to acquire the knowledge that their homeland denied them. Geneva, with its open faculty of medicine and its tradition of hospitality, became one of the capitals of this studious diaspora. Aron completed his studies there and became a physician. Library authority catalogs designate him precisely as Aron Starobinski (1893-1965), physician and essayist; his wife, Szajndla Starobinska Frydman, was also a physician [IdRef; Persée].

There is, in this double medical vocation of the founding couple, a significant displacement of ancestral virtue. Care for the other, refoua, extends into the secular order the commandment to preserve life; the Jewish physician of the diaspora resumes, beneath the white coat, the immemorial gesture of the community that maintained its rofé. And Aron's writing—for he was also an essayist—already announces the literary vocation of the son: in this household, medicine and letters went hand in hand, as two ways of bending over the human condition. Exile, here, was not merely loss: it was the condition of a refoundation, the occasion for a family to transpose its intellectual heritage into the language and institutions of the West.

From this household of emigrant physicians was born, on November 17, 1920 in Geneva, the man who would bear the name Starobinski to the firmament of European culture: Jean Starobinski. Born on November 17, 1920 in Geneva, Jean Starobinski came from a family of Polish Jews who had fled the antisemitic laws that barred them from access to medical studies; he was raised in a house where Russian, German, and French were spoken equally, among passing artists and musicians. From childhood, he became acquainted with the work of Rousseau, which would become the great project of his life.

Faithful to his paternal inheritance as much as to his own calling, he pursued a dual curriculum: classical letters and medicine. An intern in clinical practice, then critic and historian of ideas, he refused to separate body and mind, medical knowledge and literary knowledge — a duality that he would make fruitful in a work unique of its kind. His great books, including La Transparence et l'obstacle devoted to Rousseau, established him as one of the major figures of the Geneva School and of twentieth-century European criticism. Recognized worldwide, he was awarded honorary doctorates from many European and American universities, and praised by the greatest writers of his time, such as Yves Bonnefoy and Michel Butor.

The work of Jean Starobinski gathered in the corpus collections attests to the constancy of this project. In L'Encre de la mélancolie, he traces the millennial history of a humor, from ancient medicine to modern literature, marrying medical erudition to textual analysis. In Action et réaction, he conducts one of these great investigations of historical semantics inherited from the tradition of Leo Spitzer, following the migration of a pair of words through the sciences and letters. Finally, La Beauté du monde, gathered under the direction of Martin Rueff, brings together his studies on literature and the arts and unfolds his cardinal conviction: that attention to beauty is a form of knowledge and recognition of the world.

One must measure what this work owes, in depth, to the Memory of Israel. The scrutinizing gaze that Jean Starobinski casts upon texts — this patient reading, attentive to the letter as much as to hidden meaning — extends, in the secular order, the gesture of the talmudic commentator. What his ancestors from the Lite practiced on the page of the Talmud, he practiced on Rousseau, Montaigne, or Baudelaire: the same veneration for the text, the same certainty that truth is conquered through meticulous interpretation. The love of study, the highest of the intellectual virtues of Judaism, here found its secular fulfillment — not betrayed, but universalized. His death, in Geneva, left behind a work entirely devoted to this enterprise of patient elucidation of man and his creations.

The history of the lineage does not end with Jean. His son, Georges Starobinski, born in 1961, perpetuates in his own way the family alliance of learning and art. Authority records designate him as Georges Starobinski (1961-....), musicologist, pianist. Thus, from generation to generation, the vocation changes its object without changing its meaning: after the grandfather's medicine and the father's literary criticism, the grandson's musicology and piano practice.

One recognizes there a constant trait of the history of learned families in the Ashkenazi diaspora: transmission is not repetition, but metamorphosis of cardinal virtue. What the Geneva household had cultivated — this porosity between disciplines, this hospitality to artists and musicians whom Jean remembered populating his childhood — sediments into hereditary disposition. Music, in the grandson, is not an abandonment of letters: it is another form of them, the reading of a score prolonging the reading of a text.

This continuity illustrates a discrete but essential value of Jewish memory: intergenerational fidelity, the dor le-dor, this transmission « from generation to generation » that makes each descendant a link in a chain. Without attested rabbinical dynasty, without prestigious lineage in the ancient sense, the Starobinskys nonetheless constitute a lineage in the strongest sense — a chain of transmission where each receives and passes on, where the exile of the ancestor converts into rootedness in culture, and where learning remains the inalienable good that no antisemitic law has been able to confiscate.

At the end of this journey, a figure emerges, coherent across geographic ruptures and linguistic changes. The Starobinsky lineage was born from an address — Starobin, in the Minsk government —, was torn from its land by the constraint of imperial prohibitions, and was refounded in Geneva in the order of modern knowledge. From the Lithuanian township to the Republic of Letters, the constant never varied: the conviction that study is the noblest of human activities and that attentive reading is a form of fidelity.

It is therefore the love of study and knowledge, inseparable from the care given to the other, that this lineage, among all virtues, will have expressed best. In the physician Aron, forced into exile to learn his healing art; in his wife Szajndla, a physician herself; in Jean, who unites medicine and criticism in the same meditation on the human condition; in Georges, who extends in music the hermeneutic imperative — it is always the same virtue that is transmitted, the one that the Lite of the yeshivot had raised to its highest point and that the Talmud placed above all others. By transposing sacred study into secular study without losing its fervor, the Starobinsky family embodied one of the most beautiful successes of Jewish modernity: that of a tradition which, driven from its land, makes of the spirit its true homeland. In this, their singular destiny joins the collective memory of Israel, that people which, through twenty centuries of dispersion, made of the Book the place of its permanence.