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TenouaTalk14 November 2023

Antisemythology: the story of an ancestral hatred

1h 39min

Five weeks after October 7, before an Atelier Tenoua sold out three nights running, Delphine Horvilleur gives close to two hours to a single question: why does this hatred survive everything? She takes its mechanisms apart, then has the room study a passage of Genesis whose geography, as we only learn at the end, is precisely that of October 7. In French.

Highlights

“Many people are ventriloquized by an antisemitism that comes out of their mouths but never reaches their own ears. The distance between the mouth and the ear is far too long. They do not hear it, but they speak it.”

Translated from the French

“You know how some toys come with batteries included. Well, antisemitism always ships with a whole battery of explanations of the world. It is free, it is in the packaging, it comes with the wrapping.”

On what separates antisemitism from racism. Translated

“That is the heart of Jewish activity: leva’er, in every sense of the word, drawing up the living water of interpretation.”

The well (be’er) and the verb to clarify (leva’er) are one word. Translated

“The scene I had you read tonight takes place, geographically, exactly where October 7 happened. […] The kibbutz hit hardest is called Beeri, which means precisely “my well”: a word present everywhere in this text, defined as a place from which water must rise, and which ends up stopped with dust and ash.”

On Rehovot and kibbutz Beeri (Genesis 26). Translated

“The Bible never tells our contemporary history. Just as it is not a land registry or a book of history and geography, nothing in it is pre-written of the tragedies that strike us. Flee like the plague anyone who wants to find codes that would make our lives the fulfilment of a fate already told in the texts.”

The guardrail, which she sets thirty seconds later. Translated

“Getting rid of the Jew is always an attempt to caulk a crack, to stop up a well, forgetting that the crack can never be caulked. What hangs on it is the future of an entire society, one that, if it cannot live with its cracks, runs inevitably to its collapse.”

Translated from the French

The session

The Atelier Tenoua is a monthly study circle: a text is read aloud, studied in havruta in twos and fours, and then each group reports back to the room. Here the session opens long before the text, with a museum of horrors: an antisemitism that accuses the Jew of a thing and its opposite, often at once, and that takes on the spirit of every age, poisoner of wells in the Middle Ages, effeminate figure under the fascisms, alpha male since MeToo. Its decisive difference from racism: it comes with an explanation of the world included. Two resources remain, laughing and studying. The text is Genesis 26, which Rabbi Jonathan Sacks held to be the biblical source of antisemitism: Isaac prospers at Gerar, the Philistines stop up his father’s wells, he digs them again and names them Esek (contention), Sitnah (the root of Satan), then Rehoboth (room, largeness), the only one nobody disputes.

Texts studied

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