Maurice Olender died in his sleep at his home in Brussels on October 27th, at the age of 76. The night before, just hours before he closed his eyes forever, he sent me an email in which he wrote of the “metaphysical pathology” he suffered from, this idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, in which “idiopathic” signifies an illness of which the cause is unknown or uncertain. As such, it manifests itself “without being the consequence or the complication of another pathology”.
In his email, he added how much, in that moment which would prove ultimate, the philosopher Spinoza, the incarnation of free thinking and of rebellion against intellectual Manichaeism and identitarian isolation, was “so present”.
Born into a Jewish family from Poland in 1946 in the Belgian port city of Antwerp, in the country’s Flemish region, Maurice Olender had the habit of saying that he came into the world amid “a depot of ashes”. This was “the embers of life in a memory of death”, he added in 2017, in “À voix nue”, a podcast on French public radio France Culture. Far from sapping the vitality of this family of survivors, the shadow of the genocide of the Jews during WWII in fact gave them strength. “We spoke endlessly about the horror,” he once recalled, “and there was a joy of life, an enormous strength of energy.”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Educated in three languages – the French of his mother, the Yiddish of his father and the Flemish of the street – and born Polish, naturalised Belgian, and later French, Maurice Olender remained the heir of a childhood that he remembered as being “a world where otherness was everywhere: it was inside, it was outside”.
Growing up in an environment of modest diamond craftsmen, Judaism was a form of shared sociability rather than an imposed belief. “There is a lot of Judaism that is without religion and without god,” he commented in the France Culture podcast. This ‘inside-outside’ would shape a Marrano identity, one of movement and relations, which he happily laid claim to in a book of conversations, Singulier Pluriel (singular plural), published by Seuil in 2020 and edited with Christine Marcandier.
Re-visiting his childhood in Un fantôme dans la bibliothèque (‘A phantom in the library’, published by Seuil in 2017), Maurice Olender presents it as the matrix of his relationship with knowledge and reading and, as a consequence, of the very original path he would follow. This was one of research and erudition, in which he distanced himself from academic notabilities and social conformities. He described his young self as being “a child with the willpower of the illiterate”, undrawn to reading and having read almost nothing until he was aged 14, leaving school early to begin “learning to live”.
Right up to the end of his life, Maurice Olender claimed he did not read much. “I’ve always read little,” he said in an interview with radio station France Inter in 2017. “I have always tried to read in an artisanal manner, the least badly possible. It seems to me that it is best to read a few pages in an intense way, rather than to get through an enormous number of pages.” He suggested that to be surrounded by lots of books without having read them allowed dreams to roam free, and spur fruitful imagination.
Running counter to the usual codes of publishing, it was his self-taught background, to which he happily referred, which made him an exceptional literary editor. After beginning with the series “Textes du XXe siècle” (Texts from the 20th century) at publishing house Hachette, his collection “La librairie du XXe siècle” (The bookstore of the 20th century), which later became “La librairie du XXIe siècle” at publishing house Éditions du Seuil, offers a catalogue of unrivalled richness. “I am not an editor,” he said. “My approach has always been tied to a choice of author.”
His principal profession remained, however, that of the research and the teaching of history, hunting the myths that lie underneath science, because he knew from personal experience to what extent apparent theoretical reasoning had been able to feed murderous madness. His work as an adult, which centred on the alibis provided to racism and its crimes by those who are supposedly knowledgeable, interpreted the attitude of the child he once was, who resisted school learning, a refusal to enter “into the order of adults, of power”. That was, he added, because he had understood that “the massacre and the genocide of the Jews, of Gypsies, was not an act of savagery but an act promulgated by written laws”.
That is the anchorage point of the remarkable life of this French-Belgian non-conformist, who would find himself at the heart of Parisian intellectual circles, but who also remained fiercely distant from their connivences and compromises. Having finally decided to sit his baccalauréat at the age of 22, after first working as a diamond cleaver (and all the while indulging his passion for theatre and music), he recalled entering adult life with a rebellious attitude towards “the rules of life in society”.
“They didn’t suit me because I came from a world where these rules had organised a mass massacre by people who were very serious,” he explained.
After he became a senior lecturer at the prestigious Paris school of higher studies in social sciences, EHESS, the historian, philologist and archaeologist that was Maurice Olender never stopped interesting himself in these “very serious people”, questioning and disturbing them. The thread that runs through his works, of which Les Langues du Paradis : Aryens et Sémites, un couple providentiel (Seuil-Gallimard, 1989) – published in English by Harvard University Press under the title The Languages of Paradise; Race, Religion and Philology in the Nineteenth Century – remains the central piece, is the hunting down of the ill-thought words of the learned, and principal among these is the word “race”, which legitimised the genocides of the 20th century.
It was on that same theme that in 1981 he launched, together with the historian Léon Poliakov, the review Le Genre humain, of which the first edition was dedicated to La science face au racisme (Science in face of racism). In the introduction, he announced a programme to which he would always remain faithful: “To hunt down prejudices where they lie, even, and above all, when they manifest themselves ‘in the name of science’. To take up the big debates which inform public rumour even, and above all, when that is deployed ‘in the name of science’.”
In La Chasse aux évidences (published in France by Galaade, and by Harvard University Press under the title Race and Erudition in a translation by Jane Marie Todd), Maurice Olender dismantles the pretention of racist theories to establish “correlations between the visible and invisible” in order to essentialise the other and to differentiate them, and then exclude them. “What is characteristic of racist prejudice,” he writes (as translated by Todd), “is that it draws a circle around the person who is called ‘other’, encircling him with a magical, impassable border. Escaping the race assigned to you is out of the question.” As of that point, racism has no need for demonstrability or argumentation, drawing its negative force from having “all the appeal of an axiom”.
“Racism ins comprehensible to everyone without being accepted by all,” he continues. “Its very vagueness makes it all the more effective; in appearing self-evident, it becomes that much more dynamic.”
Which is why, as he would insist, words should be taken seriously. “Semantic responsibility” was a requirement he applied to all of his works, as an academic researcher and literary editor. He constantly questioned this enigma – whether it be in the past or in face of the present – of how the learned, intellectuals, strong and cultivated minds, gave in to racist ideologies, espousing, accompanying or tolerating them.
An “invisible scoop”, as he called it, in somewhat saddened words, illustrated this dogged enterprise: this was the exceptional confession he obtained from German intellectual Hans Robert Jauss in an interview published in French daily Le Monde in 1996.
Born in 1921, a figure of worldwide repute in literary studies, Jauss, the author of Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (University of Minnesota Press, 1982), never publicly explained his decision in 1939 to join the SS, just like a whole generation of intellectuals compromised by Nazism. It was to question that silence that Olender travelled to interview Jauss in Constance, the German university city on the banks of Lake Constance, one year before the latter died at the age of 76.
The result was a lesson of warning that is pertinent still today. “Silence is without doubt linked to a refusal to understand, which is inhuman,” began Jauss, who ended his wartime activities in the Charlemagne Division, the Waffen SS unit that was made up of French collaborationists.
But in face of the insistence of Maurice Olender, who was unsatisfied with that comment as a form of excuse, Jauss ended up getting to the essential (after quoting from Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish philosopher and essayist). “Catastrophe is not an apocalyptic event, a rupture. It results from that which everyone participates in, even if only tacitly. Inertia, the fact that everyone passively contributes to the same movement, without opposing it, that is what leads to catastrophe. That’s when the Nazi barbarity irrupts at the very heart of culture.”
For Maurice Olender, that lucidity was not limited to the past, but was an imperative for the present. Three years before that memorable interview, he had demonstrated this in an initiative which, now nearly 30 years on, resonates as a precursory warning. This was the Appel à la vigilance (A call for vigilance), an open letter co-signed by around 40 intellectuals published in Le Monde on July 13th 1993. It sounded the alarm over the support given to the then renascent French far-right by intellectuals from the left who relativised the anti-racist cause.
The co-signatories called upon their colleagues to “refuse all collaboration with reviews, collective works, radio and television programmes, [and] colloquiums led or organised by people whose links to the far-right are attested to”. Because, they argued, these are not “ideas like any others, but are incitements to exclusion, to violence, to crime”.
With the lamentable spectacle that public debate has become today, we can measure the pertinence of that warning. And we can understand that that call caused a scandal among those it singled out, an intellectual avant-garde legitimising the far-right, which, ever since, has amplified both in the media and in politics. “To be tolerant, the limits of what is intolerable must be set out,” resumed one of the co-signatories, the Italian novelist Umberto Eco. “One doesn’t discuss food recipes with cannibals,” said another, the French anthropologist and historian Jean-Pierre Vernant.
Like the silent elegance with which he confronted his illness, Maurice Olender remained impassive in face of the adversity which this salutary initiative was to cause him. He was able to all the more easily in that he had forever kept guard of his freedom, never depending or owing, preferring friendship over institutions, and solidarity over competition. All those for who his disappearance has plunged them into an infinite sadness know that it is not only a friend who has gone, but also a horizon that has closed.
With the unfailing support of François Vitrani, the director of the Maison de l’Amérique latine, the Paris cultural centre which he made into a precious refuge for magical and poetic social gatherings, Maurice Olender brought together audacious meetings, made up of improbable freedoms, all of which were without labels or chapels, and with generous hospitality.
He accompanied Mediapart from its very first steps of existence, without any shilly-shallying nor doubting, and led all of those close to him to join in that firm support, one that tied in with his interest in the digital revolution (and which was concretised in his collection of essays by the Syrian-Lebanese academic Milad Doueihi). His support for our project, what could at first have seemed to be an unlikely gamble, sprung from an active pessimism: never give up even when all appears lost.
It is exactly one year since the publication, Maurice Olender’s collection La Librairie du XXIe siècle, of Un si sombre espoir (Such a dark hope), a French translation from the works of Israeli Indologist David Shulman, author of Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine and Freedom and Despair: Notes from the South Hebron Hills (both University of Chicago Press). Its title in French echoes our troubled times. It is the second volume of Shulman’s account of the actions of the Ta’ayush (“life in common”) movement that unites Palestinians and Israelis in a non-violent opposition to end the occupation of Palestinian territories.
Having found no funding for the book’s translation into French, Maurice Olender sought the help of Mediapart, which was happy to contribute to the financing. In his preface to the book, he adopted Shulman’s lucid “dynamic pessimism”, that of an “impossible hope” which, far from the superficial belief called optimism, has “despair as its starting point”.
In what was no doubt his last interview, given to The Times of Israel and published on September 18th, Maurice Olender declared: “The old Hebrew texts knew that, in every society, in face of political powers, too often violent, it was necessary to have intellectuals who dream of another world.” All through his life he remained faithful to this Spinoza-like ethic, rebellious against conformity and Manichaeism. His friend, the late Jean-Pierre Vernant, a historian specialised in ancient Greece and a notable figure of the WWII French resistance movement, summed it up in a phrase which Maurice Olender underlined in his 2009 book Race and Erudition. “To be the grain of sand which the heaviest machines, flattening everything on their path, do not succeed in crushing.”
Maurice Olender, who enjoyed enlivening words through their etymology, knew that our word “scruple” comes from the Latin scrupulus, in turn from scrupus, a sharp or pointed stone. It was that small stone which, caught in a sandal, would trouble the march of a Roman legionary, to the point of forcing him to a halt. Such was the unflagging vigilance of this free spirit, who opposed a vital scruple in face of blind certitude.
-------------------------
The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse