Just over four months after the attacks by Hamas in Israel, Delphine Horvilleur tries, in her new essay, How is it not going? Talks after October 7 (Grasset, 160 pages, 16 euros, published on February 21), to face trauma. By questioning his cultural heritage and his roots, conducting a dialogue in a real or imaginary way, the rabbi makes writing a kind of black work whose goal is to transform pain and anger into a path of resilience.
The day after October 7, 2023, you told us you were devastated by the lack of empathy for Jews. Did you write this conversation book as a compensation for those silences?
When I started writing, I didn’t have a specific goal. I wrote only to survive. I felt the ground slipping away from under my feet so much that I wanted to create a lifeline with words, a personal survival manual. The starting point of this book is certainly conversations, but first of all with one’s own spirits. Especially with my grandparents: after October 7, I had the feeling that my family history and its pains were screaming inside me.
Everything I wanted to keep quiet in my legacy—namely the anti-Semitic threat and its permanence in history—erupted. It took me a while to realize that if I was writing about these conversations that were going on in my head, it was precisely because I missed having conversations with others and was terrified of the idea of not having them again.
How can we explain the durability of anti-Semitism?
We must start with something very simple: anti-Semitism has nothing to do with Jews. Proof: there are many countries in the world where not a single Jew lives, but where anti-Semitism still exists. It owes its terrible vivacity primarily to one thing: many societies turn this hatred into cement. The Jew is the name of what is modern to hate in order to unite.
In fact, the Middle Ages were marked by an acute fear of disease: Jews were then accused of polluting wells. Later, in a society obsessed with masculinity, the Jew was assimilated into a feminized figure: he was represented as weak or lascivious. Today, when times are more focused on defending the rights of women and sexual minorities, the Jew suddenly embodies the alpha male of history, with the image of a muscular Israeli soldier. In periods marked by nationalist and colonialist ambitions, the Jew is perceived as an internationalist element. When, on the contrary, there are times of anti-colonial struggle, the Jew has the face of imperialism. So, all this has nothing to do with what Jews are or do, but with passions.
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