Vilna on the Seine: Jewish intellectuals in France since 1968

EN"Vilna on the Seine" tells the story of a group of Jews who live in contemporary France. While some of them were born there, most came originally from Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Raised in different places, they also belong to different generations. The older members of the group were born in czarist Russia at the turn of the century. Growing up in enlightened middle-class homes, they were schooled in both Jewish and European traditions. After World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, they went to university in Germany and France to study philosophy and literature in some of the most outstanding institutions of higher learning in Europe. But when Hitler came to power in 1933, those living in Germany quickly fled the country and joined their compatriots who had moved to France. Recognizing the dangers that lay ahead, these Jewish immigrants of Eastern European origin responded politically, and all risked their lives to fight National Socialism, joining the French army and participating in the Resistance. Among the younger members of the group, many came of age in the shadow of the Shoah, their childhood years filled with a longing for relatives who would never return. Others suffered less, as they grew up on the southern shores of the Mediterannean Sea. Their families, too, lived through difficult times, but the problems they faced rarely compared to the mis fortunes of Jews caught in Europe during the Second World War. Despite differences in age, education and historical experiences, the people described in this book have much in common. They are all intellectuals who have chosen to work on matters concerned with being Jewish in the modern world. Writers and scholars, they identify themselves as diaspora Jews, a choice some of them made after seeing themselves first as universal men marked by neither ethnic nor gender specifity.They now take an interest in the heritage of their people and in the many traditions that separate Jews from their Gentile neighbors. When they decided to dedicate themselves to Jewish scholarship and letters, those in the older generation had vast resources to draw on. But those in the younger generation did not. Looking for help, the young turned to the works of historians and philosophers of Eastern European origin, to books written by people raised in a time and a place very different from their own. And asthey read about a world they knew little about, these younger Jews, who identified with the generation of 1968, stumbled upon cultural and political models that suggested new ways for them to live as Jews in present-day France. More often than not, the ideas that inspired them emanated from the Lithuanian city of Vilna (Vilnius), previously one of the greatest centers of Jewish culture in the world.