Alexandre Weill, ou le prophète du Faubourg Saint-Honoré

Robert Dreyfus

Alexandre Weill, or the Prophet of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré

Robert Dreyfus

LIVES OF OBSCURE MEN

Alexandre Weill, or the Prophet of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 1811—1899

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

at the Cahiers de la quinzaine

Robert Dreyfus. — The Life and Prophecies of the Comte de Gobineau, — sixteenth cahier of the sixth series:

I. — The aristocratic morality of the Comte de Gobineau.

II. — Years of youth (1816-1855). — The Essay on the Inequality of Races.

III. — Historical method. — Inefficacy of customs, laws, climate, and beliefs. — Efficacy of the “relative merit of races.”

IV. — Theory of races. — Gobinism and Antisemitism.

V. — Historical synthesis. — The great human civilizations. — Theory of democracy. — Pessimism.

VI. — Gobinism and Nationalism. — Table of Gobinian values.

VII. — Gobineau, Renan, and Taine. — Travels and career (1855-1877). — The History of the Persians.

VIII. — The Asiatic Genius. — Three Years in Asia. — Treatise on Cuneiform Writing. — The Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia.

IX. — Literature. — Travel memoirs. — Asian Tales. — The Pleiades. — The Renaissance.

X. — “Ottar Jarl, Norwegian Pirate” — Last years (1877-1882).

a blank cahier of XII+360 pages, marked three francs fifty

It is well known that this cahier is completely out of print; the only edition of this Gobineau that is today available in the book trade is the Calmann Lévy edition announced below, on sale at the cahiers bookshop.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

on sale at the cahiers bookshop

Robert Dreyfus. — Essay on the Agrarian Laws in Rome; Spurius Cassius Vicellinus and the First Demagogues; Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and Caius Sempronius Gracchus; Social Crises and Agrarian Upheavals; — Calmann Lévy, publishers … three francs fifty

Robert Dreyfus. — The Life and Prophecies of the Comte de Gobineau; — new edition; — Calmann Lévy, publishers … three francs fifty

Daniel Halévy and Robert Dreyfus. — a French translation of Friedrich Nietzsche. — The Case of Wagner, a Musical Problem … two francs

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

at the Cahiers de la quinzaine

Robert Dreyfus. — Forty-Eight. — Essays in contemporary history. — second cahier of the present ninth series:

I. — The Revolution of February, — a talk given at the Workers’ Evenings of Montreuil-sous-Bois in February 1900.

II. — Historical summary of the Falloux Law.

Where M. de Falloux becomes minister;
The French Catholic Party and freedom of education;
The tactics of M. de Falloux;
The philosophy of M. Thiers;
The “Catholics above all”;
The retirement of M. de Falloux.

III. — The Expedition to Rome (1848-1849).

The assassination of Count Rossi;
Pius IX at Gaeta;
The presidential election;
The expeditionary force;
The French before Rome;
The Lesseps mission;
The capture of Rome;
The return from Gaeta.

IV. — The Two Presses.

From Napoleon to M. Garnier-Pagès;
The rich press;
The poor press;
The clash.

a blank cahier of 196 pages, marked three francs fifty

LIVES OF OBSCURE MEN

ALEXANDRE WEILL

THE PROPHET OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT-HONORÉ

“I shall never care to be elected by others. I elected myself at the age of seven, when, while tending my village’s livestock, I read the story of David in Hebrew.”

Portrait of Alexandre Weill at the age of sixty-five, from a photograph

There was once, about a hundred years ago, a little Alsatian Jew aged twelve, who was tending his father’s horses in the forest of Schirhof, on the French bank of the Rhine, across from the castle of Baden. One spring evening, this boy forgot his duties as a herder and fell asleep at the edge of a ditch, among the buttercups and primroses.

He had a vision:

“Suddenly, I saw, in a dream, the heavens split in two, then a man blazing with fire descend toward me, touch me and say: ‘Young man, arise, gird your loins and go hence.’ He added in Hebrew verse 16 of chapter XVII of Exodus: ‘For the hand upon the throne of Jehovah, war of Jehovah against Amalek (a collective term for the enemies of God) from eternity to eternity!’”

(*) Lecture delivered at the Société des Études juives, March 23, 1907, and published by the Revue des études juives in its issue of April 1, 1907.

“Still studying the Bible and the prophets, I was not astonished to have dreams of this kind. This one, however, had made a vivid impression upon me.

“First, I awoke immediately after the dream, reciting the verse, which, according to the Talmud, is a sign of prophecy.

“Then, the vision was so clear, so distinct, so palpable, that I could not help communicating it to my rabbi and to the mayor, M. Heiser, a Catholic well versed in Holy Scripture, who loved me as his own son.

“Rabbi Aron told me: ‘My child, it is the voice of God; you must go.’

“Heiser, in turn, said to me: ‘Fool, do you plan to stay with these horse dealers and peddlers! You must go! And if your father won’t give you permission, I will give you a passport and sign it for him.’

“But where to go? My rabbi proposed that I go to the Talmudic academy of Prague. Two hundred and fifty leagues, nothing less!

“The mayor told me: ‘Go to Metz, to Nancy, go to the devil, but don’t stay in the village! When one composes psalms like yours (I had composed one in Hebrew which I had translated for him into Alsatian dialect), one leaves like David and becomes a king. Yes, my child, you will become king of Israel, or nothing at all.’” (1)

The boy from Schirhof did not become king of Israel. But it would be excessive to claim that he became nothing at all, since he became Alexandre Weill…

The Société des Études juives, which is tolerant, is willing for me to speak to you about this singular writer, who held forth about it in no indulgent terms, because it refused to approve his ideas on the Pentateuch.

Alexandre Weill had, on the Pentateuch, very original ideas. Indeed, he had original ideas on all things. Or rather, he had one original idea on all things.

Understand by this that, in the meditations of his life, which was very long, (1) Alexandre Weill was constantly besieged by one idea — I say indeed, a single one — but one that was very much his own, and bold, and perhaps of some importance. This idea (which I shall endeavor to explain to you toward the end of this talk), Alexandre Weill tested tirelessly against all the loftiest problems of religion and philosophy, and against the most trivial incidents of history, politics, and even private life. And for half a century he cherished and served it in his own way, which is to say in a thousand ways: in French and in German; in prose and in verse — very bad verse; through flights, furies, and sallies — with the fertility of a minor journalist and the majesty of a prophet…

If there are among you persons who knew Alexandre Weill, they may retain about him an opinion shaped by their feelings and memories. For my part, I never saw him. But I have lived so long in the intimacy of his written word that I too have a kind of vision of his person. And it is this vision that I wish to communicate to you just as it is.

(1) Born in Alsace in the spring of 1811, Alexandre Weill died in Paris on April 18, 1899; he was nearly eighty-eight years old.

But before that, I think it is proper to inform you of the intentions I bring. One owes the dead respect, I know; but one also and above all owes them the truth, and one owes only truth to the living. I shall therefore ask permission to speak here in all frankness and to paint Alexandre Weill as I see him, that is, in that amalgam of almost sublime originalities and somewhat baroque manias, which seems to me the characteristic of his nature so strange, so representative of the genius and certain oddities of Israel.

But I cannot think of presenting to you a complete study of the life and work of Alexandre Weill: I shall only attempt to sketch his silhouette. And so I shall recount a few remarkable episodes from his existence, which will allow us, along the way, to become acquainted with several of his books and the workings of his thought.

I remember a morning, already long ago, when, strolling in the Bois de Boulogne, I suddenly came upon M. Maurice Barrès at the turn of a path.

To encounter M. Maurice Barrès in this way — to hear him speak freely — is always a piece of good fortune. That morning, he expressed to me his astonishment that, among so many young Jewish men of letters, not one thought of drawing on personal instincts, childhood impressions, and family papers to capture “the Jewish soul” in a work of imagination, as he himself was striving to capture “the Lorraine soul.” And I took the liberty of explaining to M. Maurice Barrès that the Jews of France are at present too identified with French society, too similar to the other Frenchmen of every group and every origin, to be tempted or capable of expressing a sensibility, ideas, and tendencies that are distinctly and properly Jewish, which we no longer find within ourselves. (1) — “But in the past,” I added, “the book you wish for exists; it is the memoirs of Alexandre Weill…” — “Yes,” replied M. Barrès, “I have read them”; and he confided to me his taste for this book.

I was not surprised. My Youth, by Alexandre Weill, is a moving and delightful book. It is truly the best and most vivid that we possess from Alexandre Weill. It is delightful, thanks to the talent of the author, who, yielding in old age to that inclination of the elderly which turns them toward their childhood rather than toward death, managed to create a tone blending Alsatian realism with biblical idealism that gives his narrative inimitable accents. And it is moving, because it places before us, better than any work of scholarship or history could, the life, traditions, sufferings, and particular joys of the Jews of Alsace and Frankfurt at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

I cannot recommend too highly the reading of My Youth to those among you who may not know this book (except, however, to very young girls); and I promise you extreme pleasure from it. For my part, I must renounce making you grasp all its savor and picturesqueness: I shall use these memoirs of Alexandre Weill only insofar as they allow us to observe his inner development.

In this regard, here is a page that gives us an indication of the spirit in which it is fitting to read them:

“I was born,”

writes Alexandre Weill, (1)

“in an era when the principles of 1789 had begun to penetrate the marrow of Judaism and to expel the corrupt parts of Talmudism. Astride a dying past and a nascent future, I shall make known to the public a whole world unknown to it, which has been disappearing for fifty years and which, despite the reactionary attempts of fanatical priests and rabbis, will never return. To describe this world full of mysteries, prejudices, superstitions, and also of sorrows, it is not enough to have been born Jewish; one must have studied the Talmud throughout one’s youth; one must have the learning of an erudite rabbi (for there are ignorant ones, and they are indeed the great majority) and no longer be one. However progressive one’s aspirations, however much of a philosopher one may be, the moment one is a priest, the moment one lives off the altar, forced to choose between interest and truth, one risks choosing interest. The truly wise man, like true virtue, fears temptation and surrounds himself with a hedge of thorns. As soon as I had my rabbinical diploma, and I obtained it so to speak despite myself, I said to myself: ‘You shall not eat of this bread of falsehood and error.’

“For a moment, I was cradled with the idea of becoming a great reformer within Judaism, but these kinds of reformers struck me as doctors cutting off a diseased toe from a gangrenous leg. Apart from the idea of God of Moses, all the attributes of the Bible and the Talmud seemed to me contrary to truth, from the time I reached twenty-two. It will be seen that, strong in my resolve, I lived, for better or worse, more for worse than for better, without having had recourse to this bread of mystery, this wine of madness…”

(1) My Youth, preface.

This tone should not surprise us. Raised to be a rabbi, Alexandre Weill broke early with the synagogue to transform himself into an independent prophet, very free and often quite aggressive toward the representatives of the official religion, like the ancient prophets, or, if you prefer, into a Jewish freethinker, disposed to identify the principles of Mosaism with those of the French Revolution. (1)

We shall search in My Youth for the first stage of this development and this rupture.

Abraham-Alexandre Weill was born in Schirhoffen (Bas-Rhin), on May 10, 1811. His father was a cattle dealer. His mother was the daughter of the rabbi of Bischeim. She had seen, in her youth, the red-haired monk Euloge Schneider parade through Alsace the atrocities of his guillotine. Her own father had exercised in Strasbourg the functions of revolutionary clerk: “He was,” Alexandre Weill tells us, “the friend of Robespierre and Saint-Just, for which his grandson sincerely congratulates him.” (1)

True or pretended, this “friendship” with the great men of the Revolution and his humble grandfather was, for Alexandre Weill, a title of nobility to which — you can sense it — he would not easily have been made to renounce.

Israel has always been a grateful people. In those days, the Jews of Alsace felt keenly the benefits of the French Revolution. It had recognized them as men. It had adopted them as Frenchmen. It had infused in them a young and tenacious patriotism, in which all the emotions of joy, surprise, and tenderness were mingled. For the first time in so many centuries, their harsh throats had attempted to soften themselves to French song, by chanting the Marseillaise.

Then Napoleon had come. Wicked advisers had turned him against the Jews of Alsace. After the decree of 1808, they continued to live half-emancipated by the laws, but suspect to the Christians and separated from them, protected however by a few Voltairean mayors and rare philosophical priests.

In the village, the Christian children played apart from the Jewish children. Certainly, the little Weill would have asked for nothing better than to live in good friendship with all the little boys and above all with all the little girls who were not of his race. But this did not depend on him alone. And he had violently to suffer from the first hep! hep! that he heard evil boys and hateful men hurl at those of his religion:

“Fanaticism,” he writes, (1) “had come to us from the other side of the Rhine, where clerical reaction joined hands with feudal oppression.

“When a German feels his lord’s spur, he kicks at the Jew. Wherever a German Christian met a Jew, he cried at him: hep! hep! No one has ever known what that meant. Even today, German scholars rack their brains to decipher this enigma…”

(It has been claimed, as you know, that one must see in this interjection the assembly of the initial letters of the three words of the Latin phrase: Hierosolyma est perdita, “Jerusalem is destroyed!” That is very complicated. It has also been seen as a corruption of the German imperative Hebe (stop!), hurled at the Jew. And I shall observe, in support of this last interpretation, that the coachmen of Paris are accustomed to using the same cry — hep! hep! — to stop pedestrians in their tracks, whatever their religion and race may be. Perhaps it was, after all, nothing but a sort of contemptuous onomatopoeia.)

Whatever the case, Alexandre Weill concludes with wisdom:

“That makes an insult, and from insult to physical assault there is but a single step.”

(1) My Youth, page 64.

“The Jew has always been accustomed to not responding to insults; he is one against a hundred thousand. He knows that before Christian justice, and I am always speaking of that era, the moment there is a Jew in one pan of the scale against a Christian, he must add a few gold coins, not to win his case, but to keep the two pans in balance; otherwise the Christian would outweigh by his own weight alone.

“An old Jewish saying goes: ‘Endure insults and blows, if you wish to keep your life.’ Yet after Robespierre and the Empire, it was hard for the young Alsatians to remain calm before this eternal refrain of hep, hep!” (1)

So the child learned that he was an outcast:

“I sought the misfortunes of my race without finding them. My mother, when I spoke to her about it, had but one answer: ‘We are in the Golès.’ This word, meaning Exile, dates from the destruction of Jerusalem.

“This Golès seemed very long to me. I had indeed read in Moses that, in case of disobedience and violation of the law, God would overwhelm Israel with nameless misfortunes and endless miseries, but since alongside these curses there is mention of pardon, since the Pentateuch ordains the feast of Kippur, a day of which it is literally said: ‘On this day God shall purge you of all your sins,’ why then this harshness toward the people he calls his chosen? Why will Israel always suffer? Why, dispersed among the nations, is he always the scapegoat, the whipping boy of God? No one could solve this problem for me.

“M. Lévy, (2) to these questions, answered only with blows of his ruler, or else with sinister predictions about my future.

“Sometimes I addressed M. Michel Heiser, who, well-versed as he was in the Old Testament, could not satisfy me. ‘Guidèle,’ he told my mother, ‘watch over your boy carefully; he is an old soul; he lived in the time of Moses.’” (1)

(2) This is the schoolmaster.

Now, the little Alexandre had read a Hebrew tale, in which it was said that a certain Jesus, “a Talmudic student of Rabbi Simeon ben Perachia, in order to perform miracles, had seized the mysterious name of Jehovah; a name that the Talmudists never pronounce. In its place they say Adonai (Lord).” (2) When he learned that the Christians of Schirhof adored Jesus as the son of God and persecuted the children of Jews for having put him to death long ago, he conceived hatred against Jesus, and the Christians of his village seemed to him so many idolaters.

A little later, a Protestant pastor lent him the Gospels: he read in secret, and I do believe he admired. This caused scandal among the devout Jews who hemmed him in with their narrow orthodoxy. But a certain hostility toward this Jesus, who had become the source of all the modern misfortunes of Israel, survived in him, for a very long time, beyond his reading of the Gospels. (3)

He was a very religious child, but already a great arguer. Often, his indiscreet questions, his audacious and intransigent logic, had embarrassed the humble learning of the village rabbis, his first teachers. (4) Proud of his precocity, his mother, who had nine children, wished that this one would become a sage in Israel; and his father resigned himself to no longer being helped by him in his cattle trade.

When he was thirteen years and three months old, it was decided that he would go to study in Metz. His mother, after sewing fifty francs into his clothing, commended him to touch them only in case of extreme necessity; then she let him go, praying to God.

In those days, Talmudic students traveled on foot, stopping in villages where there were Jews. The communal commissioner would secure for them supper and lodging at a coreligionist’s home. In the city where they were heading, they also had the hope of being nourished by the Jewish inhabitants. Indeed, the custom was that in turn each Israelite family admitted a few students to its table on different days of the week. These were called days. However, this custom was beginning to die out, especially in French Lorraine, where the Jewish notables were beginning to show forgetfulness of the ancient solidarity.

There then opens for Alexandre Weill a nomadic life, whose adventures seem to me comparable only to those of that young Spaniard who, three centuries ago, set out to study at the University of Salamanca. He becomes a kind of Gil Blas, but an Alsatian and Jewish Gil Blas, a virtuous Gil Blas. — His miraculous adventures of misery, joy, and love you will read in My Youth… Without being able to follow him in all his picaresque wanderings, I shall transport you at once to the city where his break with the synagogue occurred — to Frankfurt.

Alexandre Weill was approaching his twentieth year. He was very small, sickly, with intelligent eyes, a large nose, and downy side-whiskers. He had more than once suffered from scabies, which was, he said, the obligatory companion “of every rabbinical student.” (1) When he spoke German or French, he cursed his ugly guttural pronunciation; but for singing, he was gifted with a pretty tenor voice. This gift earned him admission as a cantor in the oratory of the Rothschild family, then at the synagogue of the Israelite hospice. (2) He also gave a few lessons in Hebrew and French, and in this way managed to live, all the more so as he was thrifty and sober, and never shrank from tasks reputed the hardest, such as going to sweep the temple each morning. (1)

The little Alsatian lived in the Street of the Jews. An old woman named Bella Schloss rented him a large room for the price of one florin and thirty kreuzers, about three francs a month. He paid in his own fashion, sometimes by promising to teach Sarah, the old servant, to write, or by singing sacred airs for Bella Schloss on Friday evenings.

Each morning, the students assembled at the home of the Chief Rabbi Trier. Alexandre Weill has preserved for us a very lively picture of the Talmudic disputes of that time. Here it is — it has its interest and importance for us, if we consider that much later, separated from the rabbis by his philosophy and become the prodigal child of the synagogue, this education still left its mark on him, and that even in Paris and on the boulevard, he remained to the end of his life the eternal and terrible disputant, the bachor of his youth:

“After coffee, one went to Rabbi Trier. It was no longer a cold, archaeological course of syllables and phrases, as at Rabbi Fould’s, a dying man’s recital; it was the living, overflowing, intoxicating word; a word of fire and faith!

“Half an hour, barely, and it was a melee, a battle of discussions, disputes, cries, roars. Questions and answers crossed, flew, bounced, then suddenly the deafening cries were cut short by a deathly silence, each one meditating and searching for the required solution, the contradiction to be resolved, or else a new explanation of some inextricable text.

“There are thirteen ways of disputing; I have cited them in my book Moses and the Talmud.

“A passerby who heard us would certainly have taken us for so many raving madmen.

“The rabbi usually let us sink into a labyrinth of contradictions and reserved for the end his solution, which he gave us with a smile of satisfaction on his lips; a solution often greeted with hurrahs and endless stampings.

“On the other hand, when his answers did not satisfy us, and our objections falling thick upon him from right and left, he would give way to movements of impatience, and sometimes to fits of anger. Raising his lectern and slamming it down, he would send up a cloud of dust that enveloped us and cut off our speech. Then it was our turn to smile, not with pleasure, but with disdain. We needed reasons, not lecterns.

“One day, seeing him grow angry at a fellow student, I cried to him in Hebrew the verse of Moses: ‘Do you not know, wretch, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ The rabbi, who had already lifted his lectern, set it down gently, suppressing a smile!

“This went on every day, from nine o’clock to noon, except Friday and Saturday.” (1)

Yet this theology did not entirely absorb the young Alexandre. His intellectual curiosity, his inner thirst for justice, turned him toward the modern world. French newspapers reached Frankfurt: these were the Constitutionnel, the Gazette de France. (2) And as events in France have always had the gift of arousing passionate attention abroad, these little rabbinical apprentices devoured the news from France, and they grew excited at the distant touch of Paris:

“One day, the Constitutionnel and the Gazette did not arrive at the Frankfurt post office. Great commotion! They did not arrive the next day either. Crowds in the streets! The cafe waiter, who had a nose a yard long and who pontificated about everything, said to me: ‘My nose smells gunpowder.’ Finally, on the third day, the German newspaper announced the July Revolution.

“It was a thunderbolt. To get a copy of that newspaper, I scaled a wall five meters high, in the midst of a throng of onlookers, at the risk of breaking my neck. The Street of the Jews especially was in utter turmoil. Jews of all countries instinctively sense the intimate connection that exists between them and the French Revolution. They grasp the inner relations linking the idea of an immutable God as an ideal of justice with the Revolution of 1789; a Revolution which, whatever the ignorant, the hypocrites, and the pedants may say, was logically bound to culminate in the Supreme Being of Robespierre, and which, without this celestial foundation, was necessarily bound to collapse, not only in its cause, but in all its effects!

“The Revolution of 1830 resounded like a trumpet of Jericho in the hearts of all the Jews of the universe. We, the Alsatian and French Israelites, marched through the streets of Frankfurt, drunk with pride and happiness, singing, shouting, gesticulating like madmen set free. How many tears of joy I saw flow! For three days, we did not feel the need for food. And when at last the Constitutionnel arrived with details, it was a fever, a perpetual jubilation, something which, according to a German proverb, has never been before! A howling, drinking, dancing, prophesying mob.

“The Jewish race is always the same! As it is in the Street of the Jews in Frankfurt, so it was in the courtyard of the Temple of Jerusalem; so it will always be! A sea, now swirling, roaring, engulfing, now flat, scarcely rippled, devouring its furies in the abyss.

“In the evening, we danced like madmen in our rooms, bawling the Marseillaise…” (1)

It was around the same time that our hero undertook to give himself a universal education. With a marked preference for the writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century French, he began to interrogate, abruptly and frantically, the geniuses of all countries and all times: Homer, Sophocles, Thucydides, Condillac, Goethe, Lessing, Fénelon, Dante, Klopstock, Shakespeare, Rollin, La Fontaine, Le Sage, Florian, Racine, Jean-Jacques — later Descartes and Spinoza. By the disorder of this list, I try to imitate here the disorder of his reading. It appears to have been gigantic and incoherent. And the result was what it had to be… Imagine what this violent invasion of all knowledge, all thought, all the eternal imagination of peoples could produce in the brain of a little rabbinical student, whose spiritual sphere had until then been limited to school exercises on the texts of the Bible and the Talmud. How could it not have brought about the doubt, the anxiety, the disequilibrium that always arise, even in better-informed or more frivolous young men, from the first intoxications of philosophical emotion?

In the little Alexandre Weill, who was extreme and logical by temperament, this shock was terrible. Precisely because his nature was dogmatic and religious, his first surge of incredulity first carried him well beyond the point at which he would finally stand. With the same crudity he had hitherto put into affirming and believing — he denied. On this we have his confession: “I no longer had faith, I no longer believed in the personal revelation of Moses, still less in the Talmud. I spent my nights searching for the proofs of God’s existence.” (1) And you understand that these proofs, if he searched for them, it was because he no longer found them.

Elsewhere, he tells us of the strange evenings he spent in the company of two young women, seamstresses by trade, one of whom — Réginèle — was, he says, “his first love.” (1) (Indeed, this love drew him into certain scandalous adventures…) He read to them, commented on Jean-Jacques’ New Héloïse, Voltaire’s Charles XII, and above all the Law of Moses, a heretical book by Michaelis. Sometimes a young barber, a friend of these two young women, would turn up, and late into the night the conversation prolonged itself in audacious quarrels about Jesus and Moses, and the essence of revelation, and the destinies of the soul…

Surprised himself by this memory, the old Alexandre Weill would later exclaim, with a mixture of sarcasm and pride:

“To think that, in the depths of a room, at the end of a corridor, at the end of the Street of the Jews, a student, a barber, and two seamstresses were questioning all the principles on which humanity has been rolling for centuries!” (2)

(Was this not, very precisely, the first Popular University?)

Such crises are always fearful in those who are apt to encounter them on their path. But how much more so in a future priest! Suddenly, the young Alexandre Weill discovers in himself no possible obedience save to reason, no intimate taste save for the joys of life, the spirit, and love. Uncertain of believing in God, he was certain of rejecting dogma and ritual… And abruptly, he felt he could not be a rabbi…

Natures such as his know nothing of the art of accommodating judgment to conduct. In them, action always follows closely upon inner decision. The fear of scandal is unknown to them, and so is the fear of its consequences… Alexandre Weill, aged twenty-two, left the synagogue with a great commotion.

His account in this regard seems somewhat overwrought in tone. In writing it in his old age, perhaps this imaginative Alexandre Weill had yielded to the temptation of embellishing, through the introduction of certain details, and of making more heroic the character he had played in his youth. Yet this account must be fairly accurate at bottom; it conforms to what we know from other sources of the reasons for his departure. — You will find it in the enormous and paradoxical work that Alexandre Weill, at the end of his life, devoted to the criticism of the Pentateuch, when he comes to comment on this passage of Leviticus where it is said: “Everything that shall be devoted by ban shall be wholly consecrated to the Lord. No person devoted by ban may be redeemed; he shall surely be put to death.” (1)

Here is Alexandre Weill’s account:

“From the age of eighteen to twenty-two (I already had my rabbinical diploma), I was the first cantor and reader of the Torah in the synagogue of the Israelite hospice in Frankfurt. This little synagogue had the reputation of a sacrosanct chapel. There were only about fifty worshippers, composed of a few ultra-orthodox wealthy men and several rabbis and rabbinical students. The same for the women, all known for their piety and charity.

“The Pentateuch written on parchment is without vowels. As I made, every Saturday, a reading aloud of seven sections and every Monday and Thursday of a chapter, I knew it by heart. One Saturday (I had already leaped from one extreme to the other, from great piety, in one bound, to universal doubt, and the almost daily reading of the Pentateuch with its flagrant contradictions was not unrelated to this conversion), having arrived at this passage, I nimbly skipped it and passed on to the last ten lines. — ‘Sir! Sir! Young man! Young rabbi!’ cried ten voices at once, who ordinarily followed the reading scrupulously in their books, ‘you have skipped two verses!’ It is forbidden to speak during the reading. But since Leviticus ends at this passage, after pronouncing the required benediction, I answered them: — ‘Yes, gentlemen! I skipped that infamous passage. Read it yourselves. Do you know its meaning? I doubt it! As for me, these lines shall never again cross my lips.’ There were cries and clamors! — ‘And why?’ the oldest of those present finally asked me. — ‘Because,’ I answered him, ‘it is the panegyric of human sacrifice, which Moses, in the name of God, has devoted to all execration!’ There was a silence; — ‘This young man is perhaps right,’ said the old man, ‘but it is not for us to abolish a custom of two thousand years.’ — ‘If that displeases you,’ I said to him, removing my vestment, ‘dismiss me! And besides, I give you my resignation as cantor and as reader.’ But as I had a very beautiful chest tenor voice, and knew Hebrew like a mother tongue, and above all went fast, dispatching the service at a gallop (which suited them very well), they begged me to continue my service. The case was brought before a tribunal of justice composed of three rabbis. They begged me to reconsider my stubbornness, but my mind was made up. I maintained my resignation, telling them that for a long time I had no longer been worthy to serve them either as reader or as cantor, and from that day I never again set foot in that holy synagogue until forty years later, and today it no longer exists at all.”

And there is our Alexandre Weill on the pavement of Frankfurt. He has no more profession, he has no resources, and by this outburst has doubtless alienated his protectors. — And yet! Some remain to him, both among the faithful Jews and among the converts and Protestants. I detach from one of his pamphlets (1) this other page of memories:

“Barely had I cast off the rabbinical frock, than four millionaires, including a senator and a magistrate, (2) offered me six thousand francs to complete my voice studies, on condition that I commit in advance to the Frankfurt Opera. A tempting offer! The chapel master, M. Guhr, a converted Jew and my friend, told me I had a million in my throat and that he would undertake to bring it out. I accepted provisionally. But barely launched in this career, at the very threshold of the temple, directed by merchants, I perceived that it was a veritable slavery. Gilded slavery, perhaps! But slavery! Every day at the fixed hour for rehearsals, morning and evening for lessons. To be exposed to a director examining your calves and teeth; to sing at the appointed hour, not when it pleases you, when the heart moves you, but when it pleases a speculating director and a foolish, ignorant, and idle public; to be exposed to the hisses of an imbecile and above all to sign a paper of attendance every day. It is true that one has before one a fine future of gold and women! But what of it! Gold, I did very well without it, and as for women, I believe, with the Kabbalah, that, reward or punishment, one always has the woman one deserves, and that outside of marriage, like the dropsical man, the more water one has in one’s belly, the more one thirsts! And then to represent characters often antipathetic, to sing love arias when one has hatred in one’s heart, to lie throughout one’s life, to appear what one is not, and to leave nothing behind but a wake of foam, like a ship cleaving the waves!

“I, who knew, through my rabbinical studies, the vanity and nothingness of this short life, who, instead of being one of the accused, had already taken in the press the role of accuser…”

(Alexandre Weill had occasionally contributed to Frankfurt’s literary journals, and perhaps entertained some illusion about his gifts as a writer. Indeed, it is not impossible that this faith in his genius had secretly encouraged him to leave the rabbinical profession…)

He continues:

”— No, I told myself, this is a life of lies from which you shall not taste. The good Lord was of my opinion. He sent me a nice little skin disease, delivered me to a lot of German doctors, each more ignorant and more empirical than the last, and the theater and singing were, not without struggles, put aside forever, despite a new attempt by my friend Meyerbeer.

“The same senator — his name was Coester — who had subscribed to make me a singer, after seeing my refusal and after reading a pamphlet of mine entitled: Kolladi and His Friend, an Answer to the Vital Questions of Philosophy and Religion, came to offer me his niece in marriage, his heiress, on condition that I convert and become a Protestant pastor.”

Let us be a little skeptical about this… If Alexandre Weill had been able to marry all the young women who, according to his tales, (1) offered themselves to him or were offered to him, he would have possessed the harem of King Solomon. And it is his mania to show with what courage he managed to refuse a series of advantageous conversions.

So, he concludes:

“I, who had refused to defend Jehovah, was supposed to commit myself to defending Jesus. This man may have done some good for the enemies of the Jews, but no son ever did as much harm to his family as this Jew did to his people! One could have offered me twenty nieces and a hundred million, I could never have found in the Gospel a single truth not already contained in the Old Testament. And as for Jesus, the disciple of Rabbi Yeshua Ben Prachia, I have always believed him to be of the race of those Talmudic students, my fellow pupils, who loved the Pharisees no more than he did.

“I did not hesitate an hour before sweeping aside this new falsehood with the back of my hand.”

Thus, for him, being a rabbi or a pastor meant being a slave and lying. Becoming a singer meant being a slave and lying again. But becoming a writer, a journalist, was keeping one’s independence — Alexandre Weill believed this then — and fighting, like a prophet, for justice and truth!

A first phase of his life was closed… The apprentice rabbi was transforming himself into a man of letters; and the little Alsatian, having tried Frankfurt, was drawn by the great Paris.

Chance came to his aid.

In 1836, Gérard de Nerval passed through Frankfurt, in the company of Dumas père. Alexandre Weill was then fighting in the ranks of Young Germany. Gérard saw him, took a liking to this odd fellow, and encouraged him to seek his fortune in Paris.

Alexandre Weill was much tempted, but he hesitated:

“How to go to Paris without being sure of earning my living there with my French pen, afflicted as I was with my Alsatian accent, which I have never totally lost? — The desire to return to my country, which, thanks to the emancipation of the Israelites, had become for me a fatherland, seized my spirit so powerfully that it nearly broke my body.” (1)

He decided to play the game, left Frankfurt, and “became” French, as he put it, by free choice.

This great recovered homeland, France, he loved until his death, and when the disasters of 1870-71 came, his Letters of Vengeance of an Alsatian (2) spoke his grief and rage at seeing Schirhof turned into a German village.

But in 1837, when he came to settle in Paris, let us agree that he was still somewhat foreign to France, if not in his heart, at least in his language and bearing. Above all, he was foreign to the boulevard. In that literary bohemia he frequented from his arrival, he appeared as Voltaire’s Ingénu would have appeared if, instead of being a Huron and having allowed himself to be baptized, he had been born and remained a Jew and an Alsatian. Immediately, in Paris, he had rejoined his great coreligionist Heinrich Heine, whose table companion and, if I dare say so, understudy he quickly became… Heinrich Heine — there is whom one must always think of to understand and rank Alexandre Weill. He is a Heinrich Heine, minus the diabolical smile and the lyrical genius. He is a less favored Heinrich Heine.

In the artistic circles where this somewhat mocking patronage of Heinrich Heine had introduced him, people amused themselves with the little Weill, they even sometimes inflicted rather painful mockeries on him; but they liked him well enough. (1) Besides, he knew how to defend himself, for he possessed a certain combative instinct…

”— Who is this Weill,” murmurs Paul de Saint-Victor at the Cafe de la Porte-Montmartre, where the celebrities of the day — Théophile Gautier, Eugène Sue, Méry, Philibert Audebrand — often gathered with Heinrich Heine and Mathilde over a Provençal cutlet. “Where does he come from? He has tended swine!”

”— Possibly,” retorted the little Weill, “but I no longer tend them. Whereas you, Monsieur de Saint-Victor, if you had tended swine, you would be tending them still!…”

And Heinrich Heine intervened, laughing: “Well answered…” he said. And he added: “Weill, you must have stolen that line somewhere!” (1)

Alexandre Weill had not stolen that retort — Saint-Victor hadn’t either. The little Alsatian peasant had found it within himself, in his pride at descending from an ancient pastoral and venerable nation, (2) and in the awareness of the effort he had had to make — he, a humble Talmudic student — to be admitted to the table where the imposing Saint-Victor deigned to sit.

This pride, justified by what we know of the difficulties of his youth, was immense. It bursts forth, immeasurable, in everything Alexandre Weill wrote. And sometimes it makes one smile, sometimes it halts one and almost compels admiration. In the jumble of his so incoherent and confused body of work, if a few pages or words deserve to survive, is it not this pride that confers upon them their eloquence?

Here, I believe, is its most magnificent example. I find it in the True and Lived History of the Revolution of 1848, where Alexandre Weill relates his plan to stand for the Constituent Assembly:

“On a single statement inserted in La Presse, I had 15,000 votes in Paris. I was asked to present myself at the clubs, but, to tell the truth, I never did care and never shall care to be elected by others. I elected myself at the age of seven, when, while tending my village’s livestock, I read the story of David in Hebrew.” (1)

I sense there a force of style and a savage elevation which — to use the language of the Comte de Gobineau — directly characterize the son of kings, or, if you prefer, the son of prophets.

In this Alexandre Weill who had become a minor Parisian journalist, a habitué of newsrooms, correspondent of the Elegant World of Leipzig and contributor to the Corsaire Satan, supping with the bohemia, there survived the soul of a contemporary of King David. (2) In this little uprooted Alsatian, the sacred fire still smoldered and the sparks of the prophetism of Israel sometimes crackled.

I shall not follow Alexandre Weill in his Parisian career, for we would need to study nearly the entire literary, political, and moral history of the last century, in which he was involved as an isolated skirmisher and minor combatant. Certainly, it could be piquant and instructive to retrace the thread of public events, observing them through the lens of one of those eccentrics, half obscure and half well-known, of whom Alexandre Weill appears to us as a rather eminent type.

But this work would far exceed the scope of this talk. I shall therefore make a leap of thirty or forty years, in order to paint Alexandre Weill as some of you may still have known him; and I shall restore to him, if I can, the figure that seems to evoke itself when his name is spoken in our time.

He is a small, lively, sarcastic old man, whose head bursts with thoughts and whose clothes are stuffed with pamphlets.

Under the July Monarchy, in ‘48, under the Second Empire and the Third Republic, he rubbed shoulders with all the celebrities of politics, finance, journalism, and literature. And he himself had become a figure of the boulevard. From near or far, everyone in Paris knew Alexandre Weill: and Alexandre Weill boasted of knowing everyone. Ordinary passersby were not ignorant of his name. The news vendors, the moment some incident of any importance arose in the life of the city, cried in their ears the “Opinion of Alexandre Weill” on the fact of the day, the “Response of Alexandre Weill” to the mighty of the earth.

For Alexandre Weill held the eternal truths, and he scattered them, by order of the Lord, to the winds of the moment.

Unfortunately, his broadsheets hardly sold, and were read even less. Alexandre Weill grieved over this. For it is very distressing to possess the truth and be unable to spread it. But if he met a friend, he would pull from his pocket and offer him his latest book. The friend would listen, smile, and slip away with the volume, which his heirs would one day discover in his library, virgin and sleeping…

Alexandre Weill knew this. But he did not lose heart, because he had confidence in the strength of his thought and in its future awakening: “This book will not be read, at least not in my lifetime,” he wrote at the head of one of his prefaces. “None of my serious books has been read, and this is due to causes entirely dependent on me that I have never sought to remedy…” (1) (In this he perhaps deceived himself: even if he had aspired to be read, could we be so certain he would have succeeded?) And in another preface: “I am sure that after my death, my revelations, as much inspired by my thought as corroborated by my learning, will cause a revolution in the history of all existing religions. I also know, as David says, that they will divide my robe into shreds, each will invent some part of my discoveries and declare it his own; but at bottom, they will only be able to glean in a field plowed, sown, and harvested by me.” (1)

Fortified by this indestructible hope, which does not animate all misunderstood authors to the same degree, Alexandre Weill was patient and continued to have printed books that found no buyers and for which he no longer even tried to find publishers. (2) Assuredly, it was not in a spirit of gain, but in a spirit compounded of pride, disinterestedness, and “duties” to fulfill toward God and mankind, that he never wearied of publishing these books at his own expense, or rather at the expense of his wife, whose millinery business funded the propaganda and meditations of the prophet.

Alexandre Weill had married Mademoiselle Agathina Marx at the end of the reign of Louis-Philippe — in 1847.

Portrait of Agathina Weill, née Marx, at the age of fifty, from a photograph

She had never been beautiful in her perishable appearance, and it is no longer an indelicacy to say that she was even somewhat misshapen; but her soul was lofty and pure. As long as she lived, Alexandre Weill loved her religiously; and in the volume of verse he entitled Agathina, My Wife! The Great Jewish Women of History, (1) he dedicated to her a poetic monument after her death. Thanks to her, he had been able fairly early to free himself from the thankless labors of journalism and devote himself to his flame of inspiration. Agathina understood that it had to be so. She was proud of her husband. The household long lived in the building at number 11, Faubourg Saint-Honoré, near the Rue Boissy-d’Anglas. Agathina had her millinery shop there, and she hosted evenings for the literary friends of Alexandre Weill.

She was a milliner, he was a prophet. And he styled himself the Isaiah of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré…

I would like to briefly characterize this prophet and tell the secret of his prophecies.

But first, what is a prophet?

— “PROPHET,” says Littré, “one who, among the Hebrews, inspired by God, foretold the future.”

If such are the gifts by which the “prophet” is recognized, Alexandre Weill was truly the last prophet of Israel: born among the Hebrews, he held himself to be inspired by God (1) and he flattered himself he could foretell.

Since that mystical night when a blazing figure had appeared to the little shepherd of Schirhof, and had said to him: “Young man, arise, gird your loins and go hence,” Alexandre Weill held himself to be the chosen one of the Lord, in the same sense as Moses, whose direct heir and legitimate continuator he believed himself to be:

“Since Moses, Joshua, Samuel, Isaiah, Amos, and Jesus (who was a Mosaic prophet), there has not been, nor could there have been, a Jew like me. Spinoza, while drawing his principles from Moses, did not understand his eternal truths, because of the Pharisaic falsifications that he could not separate in order to reject them. If a Jew like me had arisen only a century ago, he would have been burned by Jewish and Christian priests, or at least sent to the galleys.

“I have expelled from the Old Testament the defrauders of Moses and consequently from the New Testament the defrauders of Jesus, who sprang from them. I have always been conscious of my mission, even, I believe, in my mother’s womb, even in my political wanderings. Like Moses, Jehovah spoke to me in my dreams. I saw him in all the splendor of his immutable Law, in conformity with the highest reason that comes from him, and comes only from him…” (1)

These words give us the essence of Alexandre Weill’s thought. Their meaning will be more accessible to you when I have related it to the all-absorbing and unique idea of which I was telling you, at the beginning of this talk, that it fills his innumerable books.

This idea is that the greatest historical, religious, and philosophical fraud ever committed was the mendacious and baneful introduction of the feast of the Great Pardon — or Yom Kippur — into the legislation attributed to Moses by the editors of the Pentateuch; that “since the existence of the world, all the superstitions combined of all nations have not produced as many misfortunes, crimes, infamies, and misdeeds as the single idea, the single error of the possibility of pardon, of the annulment of the effects of a cause, by the will of God, whether by a miracle, by a caprice, or by simple repentance”; (2) that the idea of pardon is immoral, absurd, and properly unintelligible; that indeed it is contrary to the laws of justice and nature, which are the direct emanation of God; that it is therefore injurious to God himself; and that humanity will find the path of progress and happiness only by returning to the true law of Moses, that is, to his word purified of this impiety and this falsehood…

The “mission” of Alexandre Weill is to lead it there.

It is to accomplish this mission that Alexandre Weill published so many works that no one has read or will ever read, and notably that great commentary on the “Five (Mosaic) Books of Moses,” where he affirms that two religions cohabit in the Pentateuch, one of reason and light, due to Moses, and another of thaumaturgy and falsehood, due to Ezra (Esdras) and the doctors of the Great Synagogue… (1)

This affirmation, we must admit, Alexandre Weill supports only with abstract reasoning, and nowhere does he accompany it with the slightest attempt at scientific demonstration. (2) But what does it matter, if it led him to a thought not devoid of a certain fierce and severe grandeur?

Alexandre Weill believes in God and trusts (perhaps wrongly) in the justice of nature. He believes that man is free and that man’s fate is susceptible of being predicted, because, in a given time, the consequences of every human act are measured by the value of that act and contain within them the punishment or the reward. And he believes, consequently, that humanity is master of freeing itself and making itself happy on this earth, in peace and virtue, because God respects his work and does not intervene in the affairs of the world to destroy his own laws through pardon and miracle, that is, through caprice.

There is interest in considering how Alexandre Weill connects to this philosophy his theory of prophetism:

“A prophet,” he says, (1) “is not an ignorant priest who, after having for years swallowed religious errors and become nauseated, vomits miraculous prophecies upon his fellow citizens; a prophet is a thinker, a logician, a scholar who has penetrated the laws of nature.”

Now, if God could pardon, it would mean that nature would cease to reward the just and punish the unjust: and prophecy would be forbidden. So it is the false belief in the possibility of supernatural pardon that has caused the prophetic spirit to decline in Israel:

“With Ezra’s system based on miracle and the pardon of crimes by means of a scapegoat sent to the devil, no prophecy is any longer possible. Prophecy is based on the immutable law of God, of causes and effects through Time, each cause producing its effect without any power being able to detach the effects from their cause by a miracle or by pardon, an action of virtue or justice necessarily producing good, and an action of vice and crime necessarily producing evil. On this principle, the prophet, knowing the law of God which never changes, can predict a happy or unhappy future, according to the virtues and crimes of nations and their leaders. This prophecy necessarily disappeared once nations admitted that God changes or violates his natural laws by a miracle or pardon, miracle or pardon having no other reason for being than to annihilate or detach natural effects from their causes. It is true that this false belief of men has never had the slightest influence on God, whose law was, is, and will be immutable, and who will always punish, through divine justice, crimes unavenged by human justice, fourfold, while a hundredfold rewarding the virtues and duties accomplished by humans. Hence all the misfortunes and all the miseries of peoples believing in miracles and pardon, living in religious errors and being vicious and criminal. The Jews are no exception. Their misfortunes, which naturally resulted from their false Ezra-ite and Talmudic religion, have not cured them of these heresies. And these misfortunes will last as long as they do not return to the religion of Moses and do not practice the laws and virtues that Moses prescribed for them, in the name of God whose laws and ways of justice he, better than any other mortal, knew.”

“With a God who changes his law at will, or who can violate it, like the Jehovah of Ezra and the Pharisees and the God of the Christians, no prophecy was any longer possible. How could one threaten, in the name of God’s law, a criminal king with a punishment of justice within a certain period of time, when in that same period of time the God in whose name the prophet speaks may have changed his will and law? And that is the reason why there have been no more prophets, either under the second temple, or in the exile, or during the Christian centuries.” (1)

But Alexandre Weill has come… He knows God: “God is the incorruptible Justice, nothing but Justice, by virtue of which all things exist, from the blade of grass to the planet. Never does he detach an effect from its cause, never does he suspend his law, never does he pardon! Always and everywhere virtue produces peace and happiness, and vice produces war and misfortune, just as rottenness engenders vermin and gangrene, and cleanliness engenders health and gaiety.” (1) — Armed with this spiritualist determinism, Alexandre Weill can and does infallibly predict; he is a prophet. And among the ancient prophets, he chooses Isaiah as his prototype and model, because he loves his contempt for rites, his severity toward the great, and his promises of universal millennial brotherhood:

For out of Zion shall go forth the law, And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge among the nations, And shall arbitrate for many peoples. They shall beat their swords into plowshares, And their spears into pruning hooks; Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, Neither shall they learn war any more. (2)

The curious will find, in the books of Alexandre Weill, many predictions concerning nations and men. According to their author, all have been fulfilled, or will be. But Alexandre Weill was so skilled at discerning everywhere the marks of God’s justice!

This impassive God, who never softens toward his creature, who never pardons — is he truly the God whose spirit once spoke to Moses on Sinai?

At least, he is the God who animated Alexandre Weill.

His true name is Justice. His whole life and as long as his old age had breath, Alexandre Weill vainly served this so ungrateful god, through the offering of his works. That is why we shall forbid ourselves to smile at his bad philosophical style and shall console his memory by uniting it, as he wished, with the lineage of the great “justiciars” of Israel.

TWO LETTERS

This sketch of the life of Alexandre Weill, first received by the Revue des Études juives, brought me many interesting letters, from which I wish to let the readers of the Cahiers de la quinzaine benefit a little.

And first, here is Alexandre Weill as conceived by one of the cruelest and most exquisite dramatists of our time:

“This former rabbi, who retains, in his anti-rabbinism, the essentially religious ways of the rabbi he once was, takes on, in my eyes, the aspect of a kind of little Jewish Renan, rougher, more hooked than the other, more comical and purer at once — a little grimacing Renan of the Old Testament.”

This little portrait, of such fine and strong caress, is by the author of The Division and Decadence: I cut it from a letter signed by M. Albert Guinon.

Then, I copy this charming letter that the erudite and witty philosopher M. Jacques de Boisjoslin was kind enough to write me as well:

Paris-Passy, Saturday, August 3, 1907

Dear sir,

I am most grateful to you for your Alexandre Weill. It reminds me of a very curious time, when one was not scientific as one is today, nor mystical either, as one is again today. One observed, one reasoned. One experimented less, one also went into ecstasy less. Alexandre Weill blended common sense, feeling, and tradition. I believe someone pointed him out to me once, a little old man, with character, a sort of Oriental Ibsen. I certainly saw his wife, at a wedding reception. She was called “the Marvel,” so little did one avoid wordplay. I sometimes read, in excerpts, lines by Alexandre Weill that recommended themselves by an air of revolt, leading to a humanitarian truism. But a humanitarian he was, which gives him the advantage over those who mocked him. Albert Wolff, for example, devoted an article in Le Figaro to him (before or after the war?) in which he complained about having been, in Baden, disturbed in a game by A. Weill, who asked him if he believed in the immortality of the soul! But Wolff himself also had some humanitarianism, in the form of progress (in the sense of the time), and good-fellowism.

I did not know the great secret of Alexandre Weill, which you reveal — his anti-Esdrasian Mosaic theory, of the non-merciful Jehovah. At bottom this means that actions carry their effects, which is good determinism. And Victor Hugo says nothing else (in one of his last works):

“Clemency does not exist; all is sadness.”

I believe that Alexandre Weill had no talent, but a lively and bustling craft of minor journalism, and, in addition, feeling. And over all that the shadow of Isaiah’s wings.

He represents to me an era of Semitism, hesitating between Frankfurt and Paris. I would have liked him to have been in the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848, and that in 1886 he could have debated with Drumont. But I am straying, as Stendhal says in his memoirs.

In true philosophical and literary fellowship.

Boisjoslin

TWO ARTICLES

M. André Beaunier (1) and M. Édouard Drumont (2) have recently concerned themselves with Alexandre Weill; each, it goes without saying, in his own way.

And M. André Beaunier addressed an amicable reproach to me, but one he took care to justify me for immediately with such judicious subtlety that I remain marveling.

Here is the reproach:

“But after all, what did this prophet prophesy?… One would like to know.

“M. Robert Dreyfus does not tell us much about this; and it is the defect of his study… It is, because of this, somewhat disappointing.”

And here is my defense:

“However, because of this, it is also more philosophical, if it suggests that what is essential will never be what one prophesies, but what is serious is to prophesy.

“Ah! yes, let there be prophesying in our time; let there be prophesying after historians and their readers have, despite the historical method, known all the uncertainty of the past; let one wish, after this experience, to encroach upon the future with more boldness and sure intrepidity than one encroaches upon bygone ages, accomplished facts — this extravagant and magnificent attempt honors the prophets, the palm readers, and all the sorcerers we have left.

“The principle of the prophecy to which the old chimeric Weill devoted himself is a furious belief in the principle of causality.

“That too is marvelous!…

“The idea of pardon was insupportable to him. He called it immoral, absurd, and unintelligible; he reproached it for being injurious to God himself… And again, God — one senses that Abraham-Alexandre would come to terms with that; but above all, the idea of pardon is injurious to the principle of causality!…

“Poor old Weill, who had read a great deal: a dangerous adventure!… But he had not read, probably, the works of the subtle David Hume. They would have, I believe, warned him of what is calamitous about the principle of causality.

“Poor old Weill, who was wrong his whole life long, for having too much neglected Chance, dear and ingenious Chance!… It is understood that there is no chance; no, by virtue of causality. Only, we shall call Chance the marvelous uncertainty in which we must remain, causes being innumerable and complicated and the notion of cause a somewhat absurd wish.”

Ah yes! one could not say it better: the essential is not what one prophesies, but what is serious is to prophesy…

The prophetic gift and verve — that is what had seemed to me characteristic, exceptional, admirable — that is what I had wished people to recognize in Alexandre Weill. But the substance of the predictions, what a sham! And that is why I took the liberty (page 63) of referring to the fifty or sixty volumes and pamphlets of Alexandre Weill the reader who, on this point, might feel some patience and curiosity.

But I would not refer him, without crying beware, to the memories of M. Édouard Drumont. Around 1880 or 1882, Weill, “already quite broken” and who “walked little white curly dogs” around the Ministry of the Navy, is supposed to have announced in a tranquil tone to this writer the end of France, another Poland, which “must fulfill its role as a people destined, by its very dispersion and the suppression of its narrow nationality, to spread certain generous and fruitful ideas throughout the world and to serve the cause of humanity.”

And thereupon M. Édouard Drumont prophesies in turn, with somber irony:

“The anti-militarist theories will destroy France; but the French, having become wanderers and people without a country, as the Jews once were, will be admirable propagandists for that future society over which Israel is to be the temporal Messiah and which it is to rule by the power of money.”

Let us distrust the memories of M. Édouard Drumont; they are tendentious. That old visionary Alexandre Weill, walking his little curly dogs under the arcades of the Place de la Concorde and letting his patriotic melancholy and humanitarian optimism drift before Drumont, evokes for me those naive dinner guests of the Magny dinners — the Renans, the Berthelots — who philosophized at table beside the Goncourts and never imagined, the incautious souls, that their words would be watched, but would not always be understood.

To grasp in its true simplicity Alexandre Weill’s French sentiment, I reread the opening lines of the Letters of Vengeance of an Alsatian, that pamphlet all trembling with sacred emotion and hatred of the Prussian conqueror, which he launched in the aftermath of the war: “I am perhaps the only Alsatian who still knows how to write in German. My former collaborators on the Erwina have all disappeared. I myself am old and broken. The last war, more calamitous than any other, makes the pen tremble in my hand, and the very thought that after having written these lines I shall no longer be able to visit the tomb of my parents buried at Haguenau breaks my heart and wrings tears from me…”

Bibliographical Essay

A complete bibliography of Alexandre Weill’s works would be difficult to establish. But one can sketch a classification.

Novels. — These are Alsatian and Jewish tales (Emeraude, Couronne, Selmel, etc.) Alexandre Weill collected them in two volumes (My Novels, Paris, 1886), with a rediscovered preface by Heinrich Heine, rather mocking.

Theater. — Likewise, he collected eight plays, in prose or verse, in My Theater (Dentu, 1885). Alexandre Weill was a great enemy of literary property. Yet he lamented having been plagiarized by MM. Alexandre Dumas fils (in L’Étrangère), Sardou (in Divorçons), and Georges Ohnet (in Le Maître de Forges)… Hardly credible plagiarisms. But Alexandre Weill considered himself robbed, and bore it ill.

In German: Zwei Jugenddramen (Zurich, 1896). — Noch zwei Jugend-Theaterstücke (Zurich, 1896).

Memoirs. — My Youth. — Intimate Memories of Heinrich Heine (1883). — True and Lived History of the Revolution of 1848. — My Bohemian Years (1888). — Our Engagement. — Love Letters Between Two Spouses (1892). — Also worth noting is the Introduction to My Memoirs (1890), given as the “continuation” of My Youth. The memoirs promised by this title never appeared. They would have been terribly severe, and bordering on the defamatory, to judge by this “introduction.”

In German: Briefe hervorragender verstorbener Männer Deutschlands (Zurich, 1889).

History. — Life of Schiller (Dentu, 1855). — History of the Great Peasants’ War (Poulet-Malassis, 1862). — History of the War of the Anabaptists (Dentu, 1874).

Poetry. — Blasphemies (1861). — The Financial Villains (1861). — Agathina, My Wife! The Great Jewish Women of History (1879). — Lamartine and Hugo (1881). — My Love Poems and Poems of Youth (1889). — Alsatian Rhymes (1889). — The New Isaiah (1892). — In Madness (1894). — Alsatian Epic; Alsatian and Semite (1895). — Rabbi and Nun (1895). — Christian and Christine (1896). — Golden Fables and Legends (1897).

In German: Skizzenreime meiner Jugendliebe (1883). — Knittelverse eines Elsässer Propheten (1885).

Science and Philosophy. — The New Word (1872). — Atheism Uprooted (1878). — The New Mission (1885). — The Pentateuch According to Moses (1886). — The Centenary of the Emancipation of the Jews (1888). — Laws and Mysteries of Love (1887). — If I Had a Daughter to Marry. If I Had a Son to Raise (1891, reissue). — The Five (Mosaic) Books of Moses (1890-1891). — Art Is a Religion and the Artist Is a Priest (1892). — Laws and Mysteries of Creation (1897). — Comparative Study of the French Language with Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (1898).

Miscellaneous Pamphlets and Opuscules. — The Genius of Monarchy (1850). — What Is the Republic? All or Nothing. — The Usurpers. — Republic and Monarchy. — On the Heredity of Power. — Rise Up, Province. — Men in Black, Who Are You? (1850). — Flowers of Wit and Wisdom from the Rabbis (1885). — The Wit of Wit (1888). — What Is a Dream? (1872). — Letters of Vengeance of an Alsatian (1871). — Paris-Lie (1887). — Scathing Epistles to M. Drumont (1888). — My Contemporaries (1890). — The False Jesus Christ of Father Didon (1898).

This bibliography is very imperfect.