PALLE YOURGRAU
Was Simone Weil a Jew?
"Wasn't Jacob's struggle with the angel the main taint:
'He fought with an angel and won, and the latter cried
for mercy....' Isn't it a misfortune when one struggles
with God, not
to
be defeated?"
Simone Weil,
Gravity and Grace
T
HE ONLY WAY TO LEAVE
the mafia, it is sometimes said, is feet
first. It is not so easy, however, to cease being a Jew. Over half a
century ago, Simone Weil, a refugee from Nazi-occupied France,
died in London at the age of thirty-four from tuberculosis, its effects
hastened by her self-starvation in sympathy with her French compatriots.
Jewish by birth, Weil spent much of her brief life attempting to con–
struct a Platonized Christian mysticism. Along the way, undeterred by
the Nazi persecution of Jews, she launched a series of harrowing cri–
tiques of Judaism. Even her death, however, has not released her from
being identified as a member of a "club one does not quit": she is still
almost universally characterized as being "essentially a Jew," albeit of
the worst kind, a "self-hating, assimilationist Jew" who "abandoned
her own people" at the time of their greatest need.
A philosopher by training-she attended the Ecole Normale
Superieure, where she encountered Simone de Beauvoir-Weil aban–
doned her privileged role as a (highly unorthodox and charismatic)
teacher to become, among other things, a day laborer at a Renault fac–
tory, a toiler in the harsh fie lds of France and the vineyards of Marxism,
and a volunteer against the fascist Franco in the Spanish Civil War- a
series of physically and spiritually demanding tasks exacerbated by bod–
ily frailty and nightmarish, debilitating attacks of migraine. ("I envied
her," wrote de Beauvoir, "for having a heart that could beat across the
world .") Recovering in Italy from a painful accident during the Civil
War, she had an epiphany in a small chapel where St. Francis himself
had had a similar revelation and spent most of the rest of her life in an
attempt
to
unite her beloved Plato with the Christian Gospels. Her
crowning achievement is a collection of epigrams or aperc;us-published
