A New Secularism?
In bringing the work of Joan Scott and Naomi Davidson together with mine, Muriam Haleh Davis demonstrates the importance of undertaking a history of the present. This history enables us to identify some of the structuring logics of French republicanism and French secularism, as well as to track both continuities and discontinuities between past and present, something that Scott and Davidson continue to do in their responses to Davis. I follow suit here.
Over the past few decades, the French state has undertaken increasingly punitive measures against its Muslim population, most famously the 2004 law banning headscarves in public schools and the 2010 law banning face-veils in all public spaces. In analyzing this phenomenon, a number of scholars distinguish between a culturally identitarian, interventionist, and often Islamophobic laïcité—termed la laïcité nouvelle, or new secularism—and la laïcité historique. This “historical secularism,” anchored by a 1905 law officially separating church and state, guarantees both individual religious freedom and the state’s neutrality with regard to religion. According to historians Jean Baubérot and Micheline Milot, the law of 1905 marks the transition from what they call the “emancipatory republic” of antireligious republicans obsessed with liberating France from the grip of the Catholic Church to a “neutral state.”[1] La laïcité nouvelle, they argue, is a far cry from that neutral state: whereas historical secularism guaranteed religious freedom, the new version constrains it, for Muslims in particular.
It is politically advantageous to invoke a history of non-interventionist secularism to combat prevailing discourses about French national identity that, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo crisis, propose even more of the new secularism (presented, of course, as part of a long French tradition). But doing so may blind us to the continuities between old and new, take for granted the concept of neutrality, and underestimate the regulatory force of secularism, whatever its various modes. After all, the post-1905 neutral state depended on a centuries-long transformation of religious and political life in France. After the French Revolution, the Catholic Church had to confine itself to “religious” activities that were henceforth clearly differentiated from profane activities, for which the state assumed responsibility. Rather than two different models of secularism, then, intervention and neutrality work together, since intervention produces the kinds of religions and religious subjects toward whom the state can be neutral.
For Jews, this process of secularization—called Emancipation—was even more pronounced than it was for Catholics, and it fundamentally transformed Jewish life. Jews’ incorporation as citizens into the French nation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries depended on their becoming incorporable, which in turn depended on a radical transformation of Jews’ relationship to community, self, and the divine. Like Muslims (then and now), Jews in France were long thought incapable of being citizens because they were too communalist. Emancipation attempted to de-communalize Jews and remake Jewish life by dismantling Jewish law (halacha), which had heretofore constituted the legal, political, and ethical basis of Jewishness.[2] The secular state denied authority to those elements of Jewish law that overlapped with the domain of civil law and turned the rest into a matter of optional, individual, private practice—that is, religion. It thereby became possible to remain Jewish without following any Jewish laws or submitting to any rabbinical authorities. As a result, writes the historian Esther Benbassa, “Jews were no longer tied to the community…nor were they required to submit to its religious obligations, themselves the foundation of the very notion of community…[A]s citizens of a universalist France, they differed in no way from other Frenchmen and women, their religion being a private matter.”[3] I will return to this last point in a moment, but what I want to highlight is that Emancipation turned Judaism into a religion—voluntary, private, and separable from law and politics. Indeed, the very term “Judaism” already signals the transformation and circumscription of Jewish life into a discrete entity comparable to Catholicism, Protestantism, and any other “world religion.”
Source: www.jadaliyya.com