La fascination de Borges pour le judaïsme et son admiration pour Israël

Sarah Rindner @ Mosaic Magazine:

Borges photographié par Grete Stern en 1951.

"“The Oldest of Nations is Also the Youngest”: Jorge Luis Borges on Israel and Judaism
Exploring the great Argentinian writer’s unusual fascination with Judaism and enthusiasm for the Jewish state.

This month, a new Spanish volume was published about Jorge Luis Borges’s relationship to Judaism—timed to be released 50 years after his first visit to Israel at the personal invitation of David Ben-Gurion. The book, titled Borges, Judaísmo e Israel, explores the great Argentinian writer’s various Jewish connections.
A lapsed Catholic with an interest in many religions, Borges (1899-1986) was particularly fascinated by Judaism, especially Kabbalah, and surprisingly erudite references to Jewish texts make their way into several of his stories. Even more unusually for a literary figure, especially one who traveled in avant-garde circles, his appreciation of Judaism translated into enthusiasm for the Jewish state.

Indeed, the 1969 trip to Israel affected Borges profoundly, prompting him to write a trio of poems in praise of the young state and the Jewish people more broadly. “Long live Israel,” he declares in one poem, published in that same year; in another he marvels at how “a man condemned to be Shylock” has “returned to battle/ to the violent light of victory/ beautiful like a lion at noon.”

Written shortly after the Six-Day War—just when much of the literary world was beginning to turn against the Jewish state—these poems celebrating the Jews’ return to martial glory also stand in stark contrast to their cosmopolitan author’s own general suspicion of nationalism. 

A half-century since the poems were written—and on the eve of Jerusalem Day, which this year falls on Sunday—its well worth revisiting the story behind them and the place of the Jews in Borges’s worldview.

Many scholars have proposed reasons for Borges’s philo-Semitism. The list of factors includes his Jewish friends in childhood; his Anglo-American grandmother who instilled in him a love for both the Bible and the people of the Bible; his admiration for Franz Kafka; and his fascination with Jewish mysticism, especially through the work of its great interpreter, Gershom Scholem. No doubt, all of these speculations are valid to some extent, but a closer look at Borges’s work shows something stronger at play. To understand what that is, it’s helpful to have some familiarity with his work more broadly. […] 

Even the most complex labyrinth has a center. As Borges seems to understand that center, it is located in the conceptual space of Judaism and perhaps even in the physical space occupied by the modern Jewish state. In his postmodern, relativistic, and labyrinthine universe, where identities are interchangeable, truth is subjective, and final evaluations are impossible, these provide the one true north by which all moral compasses can be set."

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Le magnifique poème de Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), écrivain et poète argentin, qui est évoqué dans l'article de Sarah Rindner:

Israël 1969 - Jérusalem, au bord des eaux de Babylone 

Je redoutais que ne guettât Israël
avec une douceur insidieuse
la nostalgie que les diasporas séculaires
accumulèrent comme un triste trésor
dans les villes de l’infidèle, dans les juiveries,
au couchant de la steppe, le long des rêves,
la nostalgie de ceux-là qui te désirèrent,
Jérusalem, au bord des eaux de Babylone.
Étais-tu autre chose, Israël, que cette nostalgie,
que cette volonté de sauver
parmi les inconstantes formes du temps
ton vieux livre magique, tes liturgies,
ta solitude avec Dieu ?
Non pas. La plus ancienne des nations
est aussi la plus jeune.
Tu n’as pas tenté les hommes par les jardins
ni par l’or fastidieux
mais par la rigueur, terre dernière.
Israël leur a dit sans paroles:
Tu oublieras qui tu es.
Tu oublieras l’autre laissé là-bas.
Tu oublieras qui tu étais dans les pays
qui te donnèrent leurs soirs et leurs matins
et qui n’auront pas ta nostalgie.
Tu oublieras la langue de tes pères et tu apprendras la langue du Paradis.
Tu seras un Israélien, tu seras un soldat.
Tu prendras des bourbiers pour asseoir ta patrie, des déserts pour l’élever.
Tu seras aidé par ton frère dont tu n’as jamais vu le visage.
Nous ne te promettons qu’une chose:
ton poste dans la bataille.

Éloge de l’ombre, dans L’or des tigres, NRF, Gallimard, 1976
Traduction et mise en vers par Nestor Ibarra