Emmanuel Berl

Emmanuel Berl was born in Le Vésinet, in the affluent residential suburbs of western Paris, on August 2, 1892, within a family of assimilated upper-middle-class Jews. This birth in a place of bourgeois retreat already says the essential: the Berl lineage belonged to that milieu which was then called "Israelite," deeply integrated into the French nation, patriotic, often industrial or merchant, attached to republican values stemming from the emancipation of 1791.

Family tradition, as Berl himself reported it in his memoirs, made him related to an exceptional network of major figures of French culture. He was, according to his own accounts, cousin of the philosopher Henri Bergson and related to Marcel Proust — kinships which, whether true or embellished by memory, speak to the density of a family fabric where intellectual excellence was transmitted as a patrimony. This proximity to Bergson is not merely anecdotal for the history of Jewish thought: the philosopher of Creative Evolution, Nobel Prize laureate in Literature, embodied in the eyes of his generation the way in which a mind stemming from Judaism could, without renunciation, rise to the universal — a temptation and a tension that the Berl lineage knew from within.

In this milieu, the cardinal virtue was knowledge — literary, philosophical, scientific knowledge — far more than talmudic knowledge, largely abandoned by a bourgeoisie that had made the school of the Republic its new temple. The collective memory of Israel, here, no longer expressed itself through the study of the Law but through a secular piety toward culture, intellectual demand and merit. It is a form, secularized yet real, of that veneration of knowledge that Jewish tradition has carried through the centuries; one finds it again, transfigured, in thinkers who, like Emmanuel Levinas, would know how to recall that study and the relation to text remain the heart of Jewish life.

Emmanuel Berl's youth was marked by fragile health — a tuberculosis that kept him from the front after a period of military service — and by the First World War, in which he served and was gassed. The ordeal of 1914-1918, which bled his generation, shaped in him, as in so many French Jewish war veterans, a conviction: the sacrifice offered to the fatherland sealed once and for all belonging to the nation. The Jews of France had died for France like the others; this spilled blood was for them the irrevocable seal of citizenship.

From this experience was born in Berl a lucid antimilitarism and a pacifism that would run through his entire work. The relationship to war — one of the great moral questions that Jewish tradition has never ceased to interrogate, between the duty of defense and the horror of spilled blood — finds in him the answer of a moralist: mistrust of heroic rhetoric, refusal of bellicose enthusiasm, concern for the concrete life of men against the abstractions that send them to death. In the interwar period, Berl entered literature and journalism, frequenting surrealist circles and the avant-garde, linked for a time to Louis Aragon and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, before charting his own path as an independent polemicist and essayist.

In 1929 was published the work that made Emmanuel Berl a recognized voice: Death of Bourgeois Thought, followed in 1930 by Death of Bourgeois Morality — two essays that now figure in the corpus of manuscripts related to his memory. The paradox is striking and it reveals the depth of the man: a man born into the most established bourgeoisie pronounces the most ruthless indictment against it. Berl denounces conformism, hypocrisy and spiritual impoverishment in a class that had, according to him, betrayed thought by placing it in service of its comfort.

This act of lucidity against his own world stems from a virtue that the Jewish tradition holds in highest regard: the demand for justice and truth carried through to self-examination, without indulgence toward one's own. The moralist who refuses to flatter his tribe, who prefers uncomfortable truth to the comfort of insularity, prolongs in his own way the voice of the Prophets of Israel, who addressed their harshest indictments not to foreign nations but to their own people. There is in Berl a paradoxical humility — that of one who knows himself complicit in what he criticizes — and a form of radical intellectual honesty. This way of holding thought as a responsibility, not as an ornament, resonates with the Lévinasian conception of subjectivity as responsibility for the other, where the self is never innocent and discovers itself always already accountable.

The year 1940 constitutes the tragic and ambiguous node of Emmanuel Berl's life, and consequently the moment when the history of the lineage most painfully intersects with that of the nation. In the weeks of disaster, Berl, then close to government circles and a convinced pacifist, drafted two of Marshal Pétain's first speeches, including the one containing the formula that remained famous about the earth that, itself, does not lie. A French Jew writing the speeches of the man who would, a few weeks later, promulgate the statute of the Jews: the irony of History could not be crueler.

This gesture, which Berl explained by his pacifism and by the illusion, shared by many, that Pétain would protect France from war, calls not for praise but for honest examination — that very examination which the family narrative must assume without embellishing it. For History quickly caught up with Berl: the antisemitic laws of Vichy cast him out of the national community to which he had lent his pen. Struck by the persecution he had failed to foresee, he had to hide during the Occupation, in Cannes and then in Argentat in Corrèze, to escape deportation. The most accomplished assimilated Jew became, in the eyes of the law, a Jew to be hunted.

This experience — that of the illusion of integration brutally disproven — is at the heart of Israel's collective Memory in the twentieth century. It gives retrospectively its gravity to the question that an entire generation of Jewish thinkers, marked by the Shoah, would pose: what of Judaism remains when assimilation has failed to protect? Levinas, a survivor of captivity, would make of this ordeal the point of departure for a meditation in which persecution becomes paradoxically the revelation of responsibility and ethical election. Berl, for his part, did not theorize; he survived, and he remembered.

Having survived the war, Emmanuel Berl lived his final decades in scholarly semi-retirement, surrounded by his wife, the singer and poet Mireille — a beloved figure of French song —, writing history and scrutinizing his own time. He produced historical works and, above all, books of memoirs of rare acuity: Sylvia (1952), Rachel et autres grâces, and the celebrated Interrogatoire par Patrick Modiano (1976), a dialogue-testament recorded by the young writer a few months before his death, which occurred in Paris on September 21, 1976.

In these late pages, Berl accomplished the work of witness: to transmit. The memoirist who refuses oblivion, who records for those who will come, participates in one of the most central virtues of Judaism — zakhor, the imperative of memory. To remember is not here nostalgia but duty: to save from nothingness the faces, the errors understood, the vanished milieus. By entrusting his words to Modiano — a writer himself haunted by the Jewish Memory of the Occupation —, Berl sealed a transmission from generation to generation, an eminently Jewish gesture that tradition calls messorah, the chain of transmitters. His lucidity about his own errors of 1940, his refusal to justify himself conveniently, testify to a humility and probity that honor the Memory of the lineage far more than silence would have done.

The Berl lineage left no religious work or talmudic school; it embodied another figure of European Jewish destiny: that of assimilation carried to its highest degree of cultural success, and its testing by tragedy. In this, it offers a precious mirror to the great questioning that traverses contemporary Jewish thought. For the thinkers gathered in the corpus of references of this book — Levinas, Scholem, Abécassis, Askénazi — have precisely devoted their work to answering the question that Berl's life poses without formulating it: what remains of Judaism when faith and Law have faded?

Gershom Scholem, historian of mysticism, questioned himself about the impasses of German assimilation and what Jews could still expect from their own tradition. Léon Askénazi and Armand Abécassis each in their own way worked to re-root thought in the Hebrew source, to reopen the text that assimilated bourgeoisie had closed. And Levinas, more than any other, showed that ethics — responsibility for the face of the other — constitutes the heart of a Judaism that survives the effacement of ritual, and that the humanity of man is measured by his concern for the stranger and the vulnerable. In this light, Berl's pacifism, his distrust of murderous ideologies, his concern for concrete men against abstractions, appear — without his knowing or willing it — as the secularized trace of an ethics whose guardian the Jewish tradition was for millennia.

From the affluent villa of Le Vésinet to the hideouts of Corrèze, from the salon of the Bergsons and the Prousts to the last interview with Modiano, the Berl lineage will have traversed, in a life exemplary for its lucidity and its shadows, the entire drama of French Jewishness in the twentieth century: the promise of assimilation, its dazzling success, then its tragic denial. This family did not transmit a talmudic knowledge nor observant piety; it transmitted something else, which is no less significant.

What the Berl lineage will have expressed, among all virtues, most powerfully, is the demand for truth — that intellectual integrity which, in Emmanuel Berl, turned against his own world in Mort de la pensée bourgeoise, then against himself in the belated admission of his errors of 1940. A prophetic virtue if ever there was one: to speak the truth first to one's own and to oneself, to refuse self-justification, to hold thought as a responsibility and not as a privilege. And to this demand is added fidelity to zakhor, the duty of memory, which the memoialist fulfills by entrusting his word to a younger person, a link in a chain that, from witness to witness, refuses oblivion. In this way, a family that believed it had merged into the nation will have, without seeking it, prolonged one of the most ancient vocations of Israel: to remember, and to speak true.