Debating Durkheim

Herminio Martins, William Pickering, Hermino Martins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135087838
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Leading International scholars are bought together in Debating Durkheim to discuss controversial issues in the work of this increasingly important founding father of sociology. The subjects covered relate to Durkheim's Jewish background and its influence on his life and thought; to a positive reinterpretation of Durkheim's study of primitive thought in terms of social classification; an attempt to shed new light on his book on methodology, The Rules, which has been much criticised; a philosophical and sympathetic analysis of the notion of the social; a discussion of Durkheim's sociology of morals based on a study of social facts; a careful consideration of the problems of Durkheim's references to state, nation and patriotism; and finally, an application of The Rules to data relating to first names and raising the issue of social imitation. As these essays will show, Durkheim raises basic issues which must be examined if contemporary society is to understood. William Pickering has devoted much of his academic life to the study of Durkheim.

Chapter 1

The enigma of Durkheim's Jewishness

W. S. F. Pickering

INTRODUCTION

Several years ago Rodney Needham, reviewing a book on Durkheim, wrote: ‘The suggestion has even been made by a Jewish scholar (a historian and social anthropologist) that there is something about those characteristic virtues and viewpoints [of Durkheim] which cannot well be understood by gentile readers’ (1978). This raises the age-old question of whether a gentile can correctly interpret Judaistic thought or understand Judaism at any historical period. And it applies equally to an examination of Durkheim's thought itself. A prima facie, a wise policy in dealing with hermeneutical issues, is to go, at least initially, to those who have worked directly with them as part of their inherited culture.

On the other hand, the logic of all this, and particularly vis-à- vis Durkheim, is that only a Jew can understand him and his sociology. Durkheim himself would have protested against such an outlook, for it is a rejection of the objectivity of sociology and its claim to some kind of universality. Further, for him science and all worthwhile knowledge was not skewed by cultural interpretations.

There is a parallel here in the story that a French academic is said to have told Steven Lukes that his attempt to write an intellectual biography of Durkheim was doomed to failure from the start. Why? Because he was not a Frenchman! There was no reference in the story to Lukes having a Jewish background. The prophecy that he was incapable of writing the book has been silenced by its very success (1973).

The question of who can or cannot correctly interpret a religious or ethnic situation can never be solved a priori. In the end the hermeneutical solution has to be decided empirically or pragmatically. The question of who can speak on Durkheim's Jewishness remains unsolved and is open to all comers. Judgment has to rest on what is presented.

The subject of Durkheim's Jewishness, however, has never been dealt with systematically. As we have just seen, the call that it should be tackled has come from scholars such as Rodney Needham and others (ibid.). No convincing response, however, has emerged. Perhaps the stubborn silence persists because the subject is a very tricky one and one on which a conclusion is difficult to reach. That is really what I want to demonstrate. Some aspects of it have been considered, notably Durkheim's early years, his parental background, and his alleged rejection of the rabbinate (see, for example, Meštrović 1988: 27ff.).¹ The events have also been subject to some form of psychoanalytic interpretation (see Pickering 1984: 13-14). There is no intention here to rework this ground, for it has serious limitations, owing to the paucity of knowledge of Durkheim's personal life.² Instead, I intend to look at possible influences on his life and thought, primarily in terms of social and historical factors, rather than possible influences emanating from Biblical or Judaistic sources.

ASSIMILATION, INCORPORATION AND ACCOMMODATION

The Durkheimian scholar, Tiryakian, has referred to Durkheim as an assimilated Jew (1979: 111). What does such an assertion mean?

Assimilation has been an ever-recurrent problem for Jews of the Diaspora. Today it remains an issue of great importance and Jewish identity persists just because of a refusal on the part of Jews to accept total assimilation. The issue of identity has deep theological roots which certainly in Europe, if not in Asia, have been the foundation of the remarkable ability of Jews to stand firmly against social and religious absorption. The tap-root of this resistance is the very strongly held doctrine that Israel is a separated and holy (qodesh) people, specially chosen and sustained by God. Such separation has inevitably demanded the maintenance of well-marked boundaries. The Diaspora could never have remained in existence for about 2,000 years without upholding such boundaries and manning firm walls of demarcation. Persecution at the hands of the Romans, and then at various times by Christians and Muslims, has been weathered at great cost through a stubborn refusal on the part of large numbers of Jews to lose their identity. They have mounted this determined resistance, never having had, until very recent times, a country or base from which to draw strength, or in which to take refuge. That is a quite remarkable feat.

The maintenance of identity is not only a social or corporate problem in ‘keeping the people together’, it is also one for the individual. In the face of the desire of the individual Jew to succeed and live peaceably in a foreign society, even to remain alive and survive in times of persecution, there has always been the temptation to take the easy way out and to become assimilated. This can be achieved in various ways, which are not mutually exclusive. One can convert to the dominant religion, usually Christianity, and less frequently Islam. Although such a step might seem logical, apostasy was never an easy step to take. Again, one can repudiate the Judaism of one's birth by marrying a gentile. Or one can deliberately deny or hide one's Jewish background, and in so doing sever links with the Jewish community completely. A common method of disguise was, and still is, to change the surname, for example, from Gottmann to Goodman, from Weinstein to Kasparov. With the rise of industrial society in Western Europe from the early nineteenth century onwards, and with the accompanying growth of tolerance, which sprang earlier from some Enlightenment philosophers, there emerged a growing tendency towards assimilation. In the face of a slowly growing but seemingly assured religious pluralism in Europe, where Catholics and Protestants were forced to tolerate one another, Jews, supported by legal emancipation, felt they could be accepted and could be assimilated without having to deny or conceal their Jewishness. This offered them a non-compromising form of assimilation whereby they could still identify themselves as Jews and worship in the synagogue, but at the same time they could adopt to a very large measure, though never completely, the dominant culture of the society in which they lived. In this way they were accommodated within the society and were not forced to renounce openly their own religion and culture. In brief, there was the possibility of a peaceful compromise, undergirded by legal rights, which meant that they could live as Jews in an essentially gentile world. It is important to make this differentiation in considering the position of Jews in nineteenth-century Europe because of the opportunities which became available to them that had not occurred before. In this respect France was a pioneer in granting emancipation to Jews. Initiated by the Revolution of 1789, emancipation extended to other countries in Europe, not least through the conquests of Napoleon.

A recent writer on anti-semitism in France has held that assimilation occurs when Jews are taken as ‘Frenchmen like any other’ (Marrus 1971: 2). But ‘like any other’ in what sense? What of Alsatians? Basques? Or those of minority religions – what of Protestants? There were some ardent nationalists at the time of the Dreyfus Affair who said that Protestants ‘were artificial Frenchmen, outside the reality of the nation’ (Kedward 1965: 30). The notion of assimilation, which is essentially concerned with culture and acculturation, is complex and too much of a blanket term to cover the various responses of Jews to the new, freer, nineteenth-century situation which confronted them in many western countries, especially in France (for a rejection of the term in a strictly historical context, see Sorkin 1990). The word implies both a final position and a process towards a goal that is to be achieved (Gordon 1964: 631).³ Marrus has written of Jews in France that ‘their assimilation was never complete and was thus a continuing problem’ (1971: 2).

The problem is this. Assimilation means to be both similar to and also identical to. The differences in the meanings must be stressed but at the same time each must be refined. Common usage demands that the word has to be retained. But within it should be included two concepts, namely, the notion of incorporation on the one hand, and of accommodation on the other. Incorporation is taken to mean identification or absorption. It implies what some people mean by assimilation, as with Marrus, when he says, ‘by assimilation we are referring to the process by which individuals of Jewish background assumed an identity which is essentially French’ (ibid.: 2; and see Meštrović 1988: 32). But incorporation is of two types. One involves radical changes in the life-style of the individual, generally by converting to Christianity, thereby severing all contact with the Jewish community, and demonstrating to all the unequivocal wish for identification. This might be called positive incorporation. Negative incorporation means hiding one's identity and trying to pass as a gentile. It usually involves cutting oneself off from one's fellow-Jews and, if necessary, withdrawing from the synagogue. Les juifs honteux were those who unashamedly became incorporated.

In contrast to incorporation, accommodation is a much less radical form of assimilation. Here the individual retains much of her or his Jewish culture, including synagogue worship perhaps, but at the same time becomes closely associated with the larger society by adopting as much of gentile culture as is possible without denying Jewish culture. One attempts to become, or is seen to become, as much a ‘normal’ citizen as is a Catholic in Britain, or a member of the Mormons in Germany, but one does not cut one's social tap-root or cultural orientation. As religious pluralism and agnosticism began to emerge in the nineteenth century, so it was possible to be a Frenchman but at the same time not a Catholic.

Where do the secular Jews of the past century, and especially those of today, fit into these terms? Some have adopted one path; some another. The secular Jew might veer towards negative incorporation, but is more likely to be one who is accommodated to the gentile society. Such Jews will probably never deny their Jewishness, but at the same time they will have little or no connection with the synagogue, they are likely to be agnostic, and in public will be reluctant to acknowledge their Jewishness.

The adoption of the responses just outlined, or the possibility of a number of variations between them, has caused division among Jews themselves, as well as various reactions among gentiles. Total incorporation into gentile society has brought with it bitterness and distress to most Jews, who have remained faithful to their roots. On the other hand, converts themselves may be received in gentile groups with some suspicion. Among anti-semites in France in the late nineteenth century there were those who thought that the most dangerous Jews were those who accommodated themselves to the society of their day by playing down their Jewishness, but at the same time did not cut themselves off from their local communities (Derczansky 1990: 157-8). In this respect the notion of a ‘dirty’ Jew can have two connotations – it may refer to physical traits or habits thought to be undesirable by gentiles, or to a Jew who tries to pass as a gentile.

DURKHEIM'S RESPONSE

Where does Durkheim stand over the issue of assimilation? His position is not easy to establish. Some of the facts might be mentioned briefly. He rejected Judaism as a religion on the grounds, I think, of relativism. The Jewish God was held to be universal, yet he did not reveal himself in the same way in each society (Pickering 1984: 10). Davy (1919) holds that by the time Durkheim went to the École Normale in 1879 he had abandoned all Judaistic practices and had therefore cut himself off from the religion of his forebears. Something of the personal implications of this comes out in a contemporary writer, Bernard Lazare, himself a Jew. He wrote:

As soon as a Jew rejects the ties of ritualism, when he ceases to practise dietary laws, when he abandons the sabbath laws, nothing more remains in him: no troublesome residue litters his mind … [but from Jewish scholars he remembers] to exercise reason and always to call upon it.

(Preface to Alphonse Lévy, Scènes familiales juives, 1902, Paris. In Marrus 1971: 193)

There is the story told by Étienne Halphen, that his (Halphen's) great-grandfather, Moïse Durkheim, wrote to the Director of the École Normale Supérieure, asking that his son, Émile, should be excused lectures on a Saturday – a request which was refused (Halphen 1987: 7). This would seem to point to the fears of the rabbi-father that his son would be forced to tread the road of assimilation. But giving up Jewish beliefs and practices is one thing: embracing some form of Christianity another. There is another, better-known story that Durkheim, while at school, might have become a Catholic due to the influence of a female teacher (Davy 1919: 183; Pickering 1984: 6) .⁴ Probably it was an adolescent, mental flirtation. He always admired Catholicism, as is evident in his writings, but he was nevertheless critical of it (Pickering 1984: 427–34). Protestantism did not seem to attract him at all and it is questionable whether he really understood it (ibid.: 435-9). There seems little reason ever to question the fact that he remained an agnostic, and at times an atheist, all his adult life. Incidentally, Durkheim's daughter, Marie, brought up her own children, it is said, ‘completely without religion’. Two sons married Catholic girls and converted to Catholicism; the third son, who married a Jew, was later remarried to a Catholic; but he himself has not become a Catholic (personal communication from Étienne Halphen; and see Meštrović 1988: 28). Of all Durkheim's brothers and sisters, and their offspring, only one, Céline Durkheim, a sister of Durkheim, was religiously devout (personal communication from Mrs Claudette Kennedy. See note 1).

Many Jews who were contemporaries of Durkheim rejected all concepts of God and had little place for religion in their personal lives or in their academic endeavours. Not so Durkheim who, as I have argued elsewhere, in so many respects exhibited religious qualities (Pickering 1984). Yet it is remarkable that, despite his great interest in the sociology of religion, which extended to the fact that he saw religion as the key to the understanding of social life, he seldom referred to Judaism. People will doubtless point to references to Jews and the Jewish way of life in his early book on suicide (1897a), and there are passing references in other books, particularly to Jewish law, in his thesis of 1893, The Division of Labour (1893b). It is strange, therefore, that with his personal knowledge of Judaism which he must have imbibed as a child when he was instructed in the synagogue and at home, he never wrote a book or article exclusively devoted to the subject or which referred to it extensively. He seems to have almost deliberately shunned it. Nor are there any indications that he planned to write about it. When he wrote a short but revealing piece on anti-semitism he said he had done no research on the subject and wrote only from personal impressions (1899d: 59; see Appendix).

As is probably known, all Durkheim's papers and manuscripts were lost during the Second World War when the Nazis threw them all into the street from the home of the Halphens. By a strange turn of fate the Nazis turned the Paris house into a place of interrogation and torture (Halphen 1987: 9; see also Meštrović 1988: 19-20). Whether the papers contained any accounts of Durkheim's own religious attitudes we shall never know. The fact remains that we simply have no knowledge of his personal beliefs, apart from the one which is generally known, which centres on the death of his son, André, to whom he was deeply attached and who was killed in the First World War. In a letter to Xavier Léon he said that nothing in all the religious wisdom and ritual that he had studied consoled him in the great loss which had befallen him (see Lukes 1973: 556).

To be sure, Durkheim never denied his Jewish background and indeed was prepared to declare openly that he was a Jew. He said so when he contributed to the inquiry into the subject of anti-semitism conducted by Henri Dagan at the time of the Dreyfus Affair (1899d). In it he also said that he experienced anti-semitism first-hand in eastern France during the 1870 war, living as he did then in Lorraine. He married a Jewess, Louise Dreyfus, and so did not break the basic boundary-making requirement for Jews. He supported the Jewish organization, Comité Française d'Information et d'Action auprès des Juifs des Pays Neutres (Davy 1919: 193). In the middle of the First World War there was an upsurge of anti-semitism in France and Durkheim was accused of being a German agent and was attacked in the Senate in 1916. This was despite his writing anti-German pamphlets (1915b; 1915c; and later, 1916a; and see Appendix, Introduction to 1990a). His ardent patriotism was emphasized by leaders of the government of the day who spoke strongly in his defence (Lukes 1973: 557; Pickering 1984: 17). In the war he was also put on a commission to examine the patriotic attitudes of Russian refugees around Paris. He was the vice-president and helped compile an objective yet sympathetic report which has just come to light (see 1990a in Appendix).

His response to the Dreyfus Affair is well known. He quickly became a Dreyfusard not on account of Jewish loyalties, it is said, but on moral grounds and in support of the Third Republic (Lukes 1973: 333 n.49; Meštrović 1988: 30). T...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Debating Durkheim
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Biographical notes on the contributors
• References and notation
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 The enigma of Durkheim's Jewishness
• 2 Primitive Classification: the argument and its validity
• 3 A fresh look at Durkheim's sociological method
• 4 Durkheim and social facts
• 5 Durkheim: the modern era and evolutionary ethics
• 6 Durkheim and the national question
• 7 A Durkheimian approach to the study of fashion: the sociology of Christian or first names
• Appendix: Items by Durkheim relating to anti-semitism
• References
• Index