Claude Lévi-Strauss was one of France’s most famous anthropologists. Indeed, he was one of France’s greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century. He also viewed Israel as a settler state.
As is well known, Lévi-Strauss was Jewish. And, unlike some famous intellectuals, he “knew himself to be Jewish” (p. 467 – this and other citations are to the English translation of Loyer’s biography Lévi-Strauss). How could he not? Born in 1908, he spent his youth in exile, fleeing from the Nazi takeover of France. He did not have a permanent academic appointment in his home country until he was in his early forties. Yet his primary identity was that of a Frenchman in the secular, universalist, and republican tradition. “I feel totally, entirely, and exclusively French,” he wrote, “even if it matters to me to know that my roots are anchored in an ancient past” (467). When Lévi-Strauss visited both Israel and Japan in the mid-1980s, he found Japan a much more emotionally resonant place. “The biblical sacred did not resonate with him at all” his biographer wrote (545). Lévi-Strauss knew that his familt history lay in Alsace in the 19th century and, somehow, in Israel. but the thousand year gap in his family history rendered him unable to feel any personal connection with The Holy Land.
On the contrary, Lévi-Strauss felt himself a member of a persecuted minority who, as an expert on Native American culture, studied another group of persecuted minorities. He viewed Israel as “the bridgehead held by the West in the East, the Ninth Crusade” (467). In one letter to Raymond Aron (467), he wrote
My perception of the Israel situation remains subordinate to another, on the other side of the world, when another persecuted and oppressed people went and settled in lands that had been occupied for centuries by weaker people, whom they proceeded to displace. I could not very well feel the destruction of the Red Skins as an open wound, and react in an opposite manner when it is Palestinian Arabs that are at issue, even though (as is the case) the brief contacts I have had with the Arab world have filled me with an ineradicable antipathy
– Claude Lévi-Strauss
Here Lévi-Strauss clearly has no brief for Zionism, but neither does he appear to be especially ‘woke’ — his anti-Arab sentiment and use of the term ‘Red Skins’ makes that pretty clear. Loyer describes him as thus part of a “far-left anti-Zionism” (467) although to be honest I can imagine Lévi-Strauss’s remarks being read as center-right, at least in the US context: they combine ethnic bias with a commitment to impartial standards of justice. That’s quite different from a lot of post-liberal far-left discourse. But I could be wrong about that.
Does Lévi-Strauss’s anti-Zionism make Zionism less credible? Does it make Lévi-Strauss less credible? Does it make someone else less or more credible? That is up to you to decide. Regardless of your stance, I think this position from a prominent intellectual is worth remembering in an era when the Israel-Palestine conflict is at the center of world events.
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