When asked a few days ago on France Culture by journalist Guillaume Erner about the modern resurgence of antisemitism—at the very moment that Marc Bloch, a French Jewish historian executed by the Nazis for his resistance activities, was being laid to rest in the Panthéon—medieval historian Patrick Boucheron refused to answer, limiting himself to this peremptory statement: “We’ll let you speak for yourself.”
One might think that this statement, chilling in its cynicism, is of no consequence; that it was merely a brief moment in one interview among many, in the flood of morning shows, forgotten as soon as they were heard. After all, this professor at the Collège de France (where he holds the chair in “History of Power in Western Europe from the 13th to the 16th Century”), a leading expert on the history of Italian cities, may simply have been irritated by a persistent interviewer; and perhaps he simply did not want to answer—during a conversation about his colleague who had been murdered by the Nazis—a question on a current topic that he might have felt was outside his area of expertise.
Yet this hypothesis does not hold up: a historian of Patrick Boucheron’s stature—who never misses an opportunity to speak publicly in the most diverse circles and is the acclaimed author of a “world history of France”—could not have been unaware that, to understand the past, one must also reflect on the present. And that the present, like the past, is fueled by a violence that every historian, professor, intellectual, and journalist has a duty to analyze, denounce, and combat.
It is in this regard that this historian’s deliberate silence can be considered an act of cowardice of the utmost significance, revealing one of the most fundamental traits of human societies throughout history: the victims—or those who are about to become victims—are abandoned to their solitude. We wash our hands of their misfortunes. We let them complain, cry out for help, without responding. We leave them, as Professor Boucheron puts it, “to speak alone.” It is even by this solitude that they are recognized.
At all times, and in every culture, an ordinary person becomes a target—and soon a victim—only because, long before they even become one, others have distanced themselves from them, singled them out—implicitly or explicitly—as an outsider, and created the conditions under which they can be left to be insulted and threatened without anyone feeling compelled to come to their aid, even if only verbally. The person who is thus abandoned to insults and slander, with no one to assist them, who is reduced to speaking alone, becomes particularly vulnerable; and everyone around them can find a good reason to repeat the slanders they have heard about that person, to join the mob, or at least to remain silent and look away when others insult, defame, expel, or massacre.
This is how anti-Semitism has always developed: When Jews, for a thousand reasons, have cried out for help, when they have shouted, pleaded, when they have fought for their survival, too many people have “let them speak alone”; they have abandoned them to hatred, violence, and massacres, and have looked the other way.
And even today, so many people use the scandalous behavior of the current Israeli government as a pretext—not to demand the resignation of these criminal, corrupt, and incompetent leaders, nor to call for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel, but to demand, ever more openly, in the Middle East, the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, the destruction of the State of Israel, and even to demand that Jews, wherever they live, cease to exist as a distinct group; to insist that they disappear as a people, as a culture, and as a distinct religion: these increasingly explicit wishes are not far from a genocide in the making—symbolic, memorial, cultural, geopolitical, and material.
All of this is taking place amid growing indifference from all those who should be outraged by this resurgence of two-millennia-old hatred against those to whom other monotheists owe so much.
Jews are not the only victims of this systematic indifference. The entire world is also leaving Afghan, Iranian, and Sudanese women to “speak for themselves.” Everywhere, we also leave all women, all child martyrs, and all victims of domestic and ethnic violence to face their plight alone. Because we have enough to deal with in our own lives and because we are drowning in algorithmic feeds telling us what to think, what to love, what to consume—but never with whom to speak.
No one is immune to this anathema. And each of us must prepare to hear one day this grim verdict: “We’ll let you speak alone.”
No one is immune to this abandonment: neither the people of today, nor those of tomorrow—who are completely forgotten—nor nature, which cries out more violently every day: it is because we let nature speak alone that it takes its revenge in this way.
This is undoubtedly the best definition of barbarism: when no one takes up the struggle of others as their own.
Whereas the best definition of civilization would be precisely to never let others “speak alone.” To acknowledge their concerns and realize that they are also our own.
To understand that helping others is helping ourselves. If only because the very definition of economics and exchange is to seek to understand the needs of others and do everything possible to satisfy them—in one’s own interest.
Image: The Sorrow of Solitude (Van Gogh)