In the footsteps of the Jews “Litvaks”

If the efforts made since the 1970s have made it possible to resuscitate the culture attached to the populations who have disappeared during the Second World War, erased from the world map by Nazi extermination, to the point that nostalgia leaves room today for a vitality found through the development of yiddish or culinary preparations, the Yiddishland is still understood as a block. It took the celebration of the centenary of the birth of Emmanuel Levinas, in 2005, so that the world “emerged” litvak “, Of which the philosopher was from.

Although sharing many lines with the YiddishlandLitvakie – The universe of Lithuanian Jews – refers to a singular history and Judaism. From this tradition, Levinas was not the only representative. We can cite the filmmaker Eisenstein, Golda Meir, Prime Minister of the State of Israel, the painters Soutine or Chagall and, closer to us, Lauren Bacall and Charles Bronson. Areoping sufficiently diverse and prestigious to justify the interest in the history of this missing community.

Judaism leg companies

The work develops on two levels. A fairly general level, present to the reader what Jewish life was in the spaces of Central Europe and the Russian Empire since the establishment of the first communities. He returns to the description of the functioning of these communities organized around the heder (place of study), mikve (ritual bath), Yeshiva (religious school), as soon as the community achieved a certain importance, but also kehillot (organized communities) which reflect in reality a certain form of administrative autonomy. However, we quickly leave the field of general discourse to approach the substantive argument of the work. Because what the authors seek to make us feel, beyond the specificities of this Lithuanian Judaism, these are the virtualities that the spiritual space has been able to represent for the history of European Judaism on which its singularity opens.

More than a discussion on geographic cutting (the authors show how much, in a space constantly redrawn according to historical upheavals, it is often the cultural tensions that trace the lines of force), the work is an ethnographic survey. One of its main contributions is to question the rennic presentations of the shtetltoo often associated with a good -natured folklore. The world of Litvaks then thickens not only tensions which oppose it to a most often hostile non-Jewish society, but also from those which arise from a singular reading of Judaism and the relationship to traditions. Because it is in the originality of its construction, within which a demanding rationality is put at the service of a severe religiosity, that the strength of Judaism litvak resides.

This is evidenced by the influence of the thought of the Gaon de Vilna, an example among others of the fertility of this “ third way », Intermediary between the impulses of a mystical Judaism which she pushes and a modernist temptation dismissing the link with tradition. Likewise, one can think of the personality and writings of Haïm Ben Itzhok de Volojin, whose philosopher C. Chalier showed the influence he had exerted on the thought of Levinas.

If Lithuanian Judaism rubs, like other European Judaisms from the 1820s, in Haskalah and took the path of modernization, the most important meeting, at the end of XIX^e century, is the one he does with Russian culture. Under the leadership of the Count of Witte, Minister of Tsar Alexandre IIwhich favored from 1870 the opening of the Russian provinces of Belarus and Lithuania, the condition of the Jewish communities was largely softened, which allowed young generations to frequent the school and to access the great works of the literature through this. Reading Pushkin, Tolstoy or Dostoevski will play a decisive role for this generation, the Jewish intelligentsia before the First World War resembling many points to the Russian intelligentsia. Vilna, baptized the “ Northern Jerusalem “, Became the intellectual center. It is on this fertile soil that the sensitivity of Judaism will develop to socialist currents and that the Bund, socialist, nationalist and internationalist, confronted with its Zionist competitor born in the same year (1897), also emancipating the Jewish masses.

The First World War and the period of the interwar period brought profound upheavals following territorial rediscovery, Poland extending to the east while part of Belarus and northern Ukraine pass under Soviet domination. While multiple studies on the communities of Poland followed the pioneering work of Rachel Ertel, showing how between two disasters the Polish Jewish society had found the strength to develop an exceptional cultural richness, the history of other communities had remained in the shadows.

Here again, the work partially fills this lack, even if the developments devoted to political developments remain a little rapid. If we know that the Soviet regime submitted its Jewish minorities to systematic persecution, the work shows that the case of the communities present in the Baltic states, generally passed over in silence, is more complex. This makes these communities – notably Litvaks – of the leg societies of Judaism, which articulate in segments of national history various forms of insertion in host societies. It is to this specificity that totalitarian logics ended at work during the Second World War. Baltic states will fall under Russian domination in June 1940 and the populations will be exterminated. As for the fate of the Jews of Belarus, the research carried out for ten years has shown the magnitude of what is today designated under the name of “ Shoah by bullets ».

Another story ?

The idea that history could have been different if the Litvakes populations had not been exterminated justifies the development, in the second part of the work, of a more intellectual reflection. Through a highlighting of linguistic and religious practices, forms of piety and the emergence of secularism, it is in search of a Litvak temperament that authors tend. The presence of Hebrew spoken in litvakie at XVIII^e Century and the existence of an original literature show how, beyond their inscription in a traditional Jewish cultural area, Litvaks translated in the different languages ​​or the different fields the shared feeling of their exceptionality. This is also evidenced by the resurgences of this culture among the survivors of the Second World War. In Paris or New York, many artists are still combining today, like the painter Mark Rothko, an original way of joining the individual in the universal.

Can we then reread the history of contemporary Judaism in the light of the Litvak heritage ? If the Litvakie has definitively disappeared from the contemporary geopolitical landscape, its heritage remains. However, we come out somewhat perplexed from this reading: through the different diasporas, if Litvak Judaism still remains through a few individuals, it is perpetuated neither in a specific intellectual current, nor in a way of thinking. There is undoubtedly the unique difficulty of communities which have intellectualized their destiny more intellectualized that they have sought to authenticate it through transmitted practical or folklorical elements from generation to generation.