Jewish thought against itself: Concealment, assimilation and double existence in the work of Nathan Devers

Introduction: Religion as Material for Thought

Thinking against oneself (Albin Michel, 2024, cited as PCS) is an autobiographical and philosophical narrative in which Nathan Devers traces his journey from Orthodox Judaism to philosophy. Jewishness is not merely decorative or a biographical detail, but rather the very substance that ignites the "thinking against oneself" announced in the title. The book does not tell a story of defection in the conventional sense—not an adolescent's rebellion against a restrictive upbringing, not a seduction by foreign ideas, not a trauma. It tells something more disturbing: how religious sincerity, driven to its extreme, pulls the rug out from under oneself, and how faith ends precisely where it is taken most seriously.

In the book, Jewishness undergoes a clearly structured process. It begins as origin and social atmosphere, then becomes intellectual passion and religious radicalization, and finally the source of its own dissolution. These three stages can be traced in the book's composition itself, whose sections bear programmatic titles: "How Beginnings Fade," "The Names Come from Elsewhere," "To Whom the Call Belongs," "The Desert Is a Spring," "Things Are Words." In what follows, I will examine these stages and attempt to demonstrate that, for Devers, Jewishness is primarily a figure of movement against itself.

Individual aspects

Origin: Judaism as a milieu and atmosphere

The book begins with Kippur. “Tout avait pourtant débuté un jour de Kippour” – everything had nevertheless begun on a Day of Atonement. In the narrator's family, Kippur is the only day on which, as they say, one is “one hundred percent” Jewish, from morning till night and from head to toe. This opening alone sets a tone: Judaism appears here less as a faith than as a state of exception. For twenty-five hours, all of daily life is suspended – no school, no multiplication tables, no electricity, no food, no water. Kippur is not primarily the religious festival, but the “truce of daily life,” in which all habits are put on hold.

The young narrator, still in elementary school, isn't religiously obligated to fast, but desperately wants to emulate the adults. The scene in which he stuffs himself with bread, rice cakes, water, and bananas the night before, in order to break his "record from last year," is narrated with comic detachment. Religious beliefs appear in the mode of childlike imitation and athletic ambition—an appropriation from the outside, through imitation, long before any meaning has been understood.

This impression of an atmospheric, socially coded Judaism is reinforced by the second major image of the early chapters: Sunday classes at the synagogue on Rue Ancelle in Neuilly, the "Talmud Torah" of the affluent western districts of Paris. Devers portrays it with biting irony. Most of the students fit the stereotypical image of Jewish "chalalas": tight jeans and gelled hair, streetwear and parents who are surgeons, a Star of David pendant and a New York cap, plus the obligatory high-top Nikes, color-coordinated with their braces—"Jewish American Princess" in the Auteuil-Neuilly-Passy style. In religious instruction, they discuss Armani as much as Ezekiel. The teacher captures the children's attention with chocolate bars; a "pedagogy of drug dealers" that works in the land of the chalalas. The goal of this training, the narrator sarcastically states, is to become a "perfect weekend Jew" who practices religion like others pursue a relaxing hobby, such as tennis.

Here, a principle is named that will ignite the narrator's later break with this milieu: the principle of the Israelites of Auteuil, "juif à l'intérieur, français à l'extérieur" – Jew inside, French outside, hidden like the flesh of a fruit beneath a skin so tough that nothing can break it. In this first instance, Jewishness is thus doubly defined: as a familial given devoid of religious intensity, and as a social marker of an assimilated, bourgeois Judaism that knows how to render itself invisible to the outside world.

Genealogy: Exile, displaced Jerusalem, the provisional nature of identity

Before the book traces the narrator's religious ascension, it inserts a genealogy—the "inevitable detour," as Sartre puts it, to understand "what I have made of what others have made of me." This family history is central to the interpretation of Jewishness because it prepares the ground for the theme that later becomes a philosophical bombshell: contingency, the conditionality of one's own identity by chance and origin.

The narrator's ancestors, as he writes, are a long line of unforeseen exiles, sudden departures, and lost lands. There is not a single nation in the Mediterranean from which they were not at some point expelled—"experts en valises," experts in suitcases and removals, "docteurs en nomadism." They spoke "judio," an impossible mishmash of all the world's languages, a "concentrate of human speech." Their last stop before France was Algeria, the area around Oran, from where the family set out again after independence.

Devers encapsulates this Jewish fate in a guiding principle: For two thousand years, Jews have spent their time displacing Jerusalem to their exiles everywhere. From Alexandria to Seville, from Vilnius to Tetouan, from Moscow to New York, they erected an entire galaxy of micro-Jerusalems, substitute capitals that replaced nothing and invariably fell into ruin. "Jérusalem" ultimately becomes the name for all the cities in which they have lived. Identity here appears as a permanent provisional arrangement, a series of mirages, "mirages," inhabited out of necessity. The ship carrying the grandparents Armand and Paulette from Algeria to Nice sails toward a "sky of water," their "only anchor"—an image for an existence that has no firm ground left but the horizon itself.

This genealogy establishes a motif that will later become crucial. If Jewish identity is historically experienced as a constant displacement of the sacred, as a substitute and an illusion, then a question is already inherent in it: On what is the foundation of what I consider my innermost being? The desert, the exile, the lost land are not merely historical facts, but become ciphers for a groundlessness that is given a philosophical twist at the end of the book—culminating in the subtitle "The Desert Is a Source."

Appropriation and radicalization: The path to orthodoxy

The narrator's break with the placid milieu of Neuilly doesn't lead him away from Judaism, but rather deeper into it. This is the paradoxical point of the book's middle section. After a pilgrimage to Israel—Mont des Oliviers at sunrise, Jerusalem, which, contrary to his intentions, nevertheless captivates him—the narrator makes a decision: he wants to go to the synagogue alone, outside of Kippur, of his own volition. He knocks on the door of the ENIO (École normale israélite orientale) in Auteuil, which becomes his "second family," his "Jewish church steeple in the village of Auteuil."

Here begins a process of appropriation, which the book describes with great precision. The narrator discovers an "irresistible hunger" for knowledge, an almost addictive lust for learning. While he appears indifferent to sports, he devours the Hebrew letters, the prayers, the biblical narratives. His eyes, he writes, "photocopied" every page and archived it. The ENIO appears as a small, close-knit community with its characters—Pardo, who leads the morning service and mercilessly corrects him; Daniel Ohana, who admonishes him to read not only the Torah but also the Prophets; the elderly Algerian Jew, Adolphe Zerbib. Devers compares this community to a commedia dell'arte, a microcosm of characters who always perform the same play, improvising it in the process.

Religion initially gives the narrator something he describes as a gift: a structure, a discipline, a reason to wake up every morning, even a good mood. “Car la religion m’apporta en premier lieu ceci” – religion brought him above all this: automatic, early waking, “fresh and lively.” Then comes the actual radicalization. The narrator, as he says, quickly becomes “truly Orthodox.” He vows to strictly observe Shabbat, with its ocean of prohibitions: no lighting anything, no carrying anything, no cutting anything – not even toilet paper, which he has to lay out the night before – no writing, no building, no going to the beach in summer because of the footprints in the sand. And to balance these prohibitions, the positive obligations: going to the synagogue three times, attending four services, three substantial meals, and spending the rest of his time studying the Torah.

Particularly revealing is a scene of self-aggrandizement: One morning, the narrator decides to no longer remove his kippah, but to wear it in the street—thus violating the very principle of the Israelites of Auteuil, of being Jewish inside and French outside. He interprets this not as a declaration of identity, but as adherence to a Talmudic precept (Tractate Kiddushin, page 31a, the reference to Rav Huna, who never walked four cubits with his head uncovered). The kippah, according to commentators, is "a dome woven from humility." What becomes apparent here is crucial for interpreting the entire book: The narrator's piety itself is a "thinking against himself," a striving and radicalizing beyond his inherited practice. The movement of self-overcoming, which later culminates in the break, is already at work in the religious phase.

The culmination of this phase is the encounter with Rav Kotmel, a teacher appointed by the Alliance israélite universelle, whose teaching surpasses anything the narrator has known. Kotmel begins his lessons in a barely audible voice, compels his listeners to silence, and teaches profoundly about the Law, the Bible, and Maimonides. From him, the narrator learns not only Hebrew and Aramaic, but also the "passion of tolerance" and the art of rhetoric. Under Kotmel's guidance, the narrator becomes so familiar with Judaism "as if I had been born into an Orthodox family." He is ready to enter a yeshiva and become a rabbi. It is precisely at this moment of completion that the narrative takes a turn.

Jewish life in France: Concealment, safety, antisemitism

Before the book recounts the inner rupture, it depicts the external milieu in which the narrator's religious ascent takes place—a milieu characterized by security measures, concealment, and real threats. The observations about Jewish life in France are not abstract or sociological, but rather embodied in concrete scenes. They coalesce into three observations that paint a picture of Judaism under pressure.

Firstly, Jewish community life is consistently organized under the constraints of security. The narrator enters the ENIO synagogue through a security checkpoint; a guard, scrutinizing him out of fear of attacks, is more suspicious than a customs officer and only allows the early morning visitor to pass after lengthy negotiations. This normality of checkpoint, guard, and suspicion appears casually in the text, but precisely because of this, it becomes a self-evident framework: prayer begins behind locked doors. A Jewish life that must constantly organize itself under protection is not lamented here, but rather described as a given condition.

Secondly, Devers develops a veritable phenomenology of concealment from the already cited principle of "Jew inside, French outside." The narrator describes how he tricks himself to keep his beret on until he reaches his chair, how he feigns illness to avoid greeting girlfriends with a kiss on the cheek, how he hides his tallit in his trousers when entering the school, and how he retreats to the neighboring park for afternoon prayers. He calls himself the "invisible Jew under a banal teenager," and coined the phrase "Marrane d'Auteuil" for this condition. The reference is precisely chosen: the Marranos were the forcibly baptized Iberian Jews who continued to practice their faith in secret. Assimilation thus appears not as successful integration, but as a double life, as a history of crypto-Jewishness extended into the bourgeois sphere.

Thirdly, the book names antisemitism directly and in precise scenes. When the narrator demonstratively wears a kippah in the street, he is insulted, followed, cursed, and spat upon. Devers describes a drunk on Boulevard du Montparnasse who threatens to beat and burn him; youths who throw glass bottles from a balcony and call him a "Zionist"; a man on the tram who, upon seeing him, shouts that he is "worse than a Nazi." The narrator's reaction is revealing. He reverses—deliberately provocatively—the racist mania for identifying Jews by their appearance and claims to have learned to recognize antisemites "at first glance": by a certain look full of fearful fascination. And he adopts a peculiar stance: he ultimately made fun of the antisemites, he says, and despite his own fearfulness, he was not afraid of them. The external threat is thus subordinated to the inner religious path – the hatred of others is less decisive for the narrator than his own struggle with faith.

Finally, the book differentiates between an internal and external perspective. Rabbi Betham rails against immoral, pious Jews as "anti-Semites of the Interior," a disgrace to their own people; he cannot bear the thought that the Jewish people could be "like everyone else," with righteous individuals and villains. This internal Jewish self-criticism stands alongside the image of a pluralistic France that Devers sketches in the setting of the high school: a "drapeau bigarré," a colorful flag of origins and religions—"the fires, the Catholics, the Muslims"—in which Jewish existence is one affiliation among many. Jewish life in France thus appears neither as a purely victimized existence nor as seamless integration, but as a precarious balance between visibility and concealment, threat and everyday life.

The Break from Within: Ecclesiastes and the Dizziness of Birth

The turning point doesn't come from the outside. It comes from within a sacred text itself. The narrator is preparing a course on Ecclesiastes—the Book of Preacher Solomon—which he has never read before. This text overwhelms him. Devers describes it as one of those rare poems capable of expressing the unspeakable, whose Hebrew "dances" and "flashes." Ecclesiastes is the "sublime point" at which the Bible itself breaks, "its star and its grave." From within, "from the very spirit of Israel," this book shatters all the illusions that make that spirit possible. It crushes its reader and leaves him speechless, lost on the road.

At the heart of it all lies one word: "Vanité"—vanity, nothingness, hevel. If it means that no inherent value exists in the universe, independent of the meaning one chooses to ascribe to one's situation, then the narrator is confronted with the question of the very reason for his existence. Until now, his spiritual quest had unfolded within Judaism; there he found the framework within which his questions developed, the book that justified his presence on Earth. Every morning he awoke knowing why: because God, his Jewish God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, had entrusted him with a life. But what, he now asks, was the basis of this motivation? The fact that he was Jewish. And why was he? Because his birth had decreed it so.

Here the book takes its decisive turn. The narrator poses the question of the counterfactual: Had he been born to Muslim, Christian, atheist, or Buddhist parents, in ancient Greece, in seventh-century Arabia, in medieval India, or in 1910 into a Marxist family—would he have attached the least importance to the Torah? Would he have drawn his truths from the Talmud? The answer, he writes, “opened his eyes”: no. What follows is a litany of negation. No to the illusion of considering a religion absolute, a religion whose name one could not have known. No to this conditioning by chance. No to the comfort of hoping that truth was bestowed upon one at birth. No to the ease of considering one's own identity the center of the world. He must turn against what he had considered the foundation of his being—defused himself from his “self.”

This is the core of Jewishness in the book: it provides the very tool for its own dissolution. The initial yearning for philosophy does not stem from an event, a suffering, a trauma, or a trigger, but from a premonition, a "vertige angoissé," a fearful dizziness: Was my religion not merely the phenomenon of my own birth? The trappings of my coming into the world? A constellation invented by the desire to believe? A monumental vanity? It is noteworthy that Devers emphasizes he didn't even need to read Ecclesiastes to feel this dizziness—he had already encountered it deep within himself. The sacred text is not the cause, but rather the mirror reflecting a suspicion already present in the genealogy of exile, in the displaced Jerusalem, in the experience of identity as provisional.

The transition to philosophy: continuity instead of contrast

The transition to philosophy doesn't occur in opposition to the deepest immersion in Judaism, but rather in parallel. The most striking scene illustrating this is Rav Kotmel's summer seminar in La Plagne, a hotel in the Alps converted into a "giant synagogue"—the narrator calls it the "shtetl of Haute-Savoie." There, he finally masters the Talmud, Rashi, and the Torah in the original language; he teaches a course on Ecclesiastes, which Kotmel finds rigorous; he is ready for the yeshiva. "Et pourtant, j'avais la tête ailleurs"—and yet my mind was elsewhere. In his free time, he locks himself in his room and reads Husserl, Descartes, Plato, and Heidegger, works that initially seem as enigmatic to him as the Talmud once did. The deepest religious mastery and the beginning of his philosophical journey coincide in the same summer, in the same place.

In the narrator's synagogue sermons, the tone shifts: he now comments on the Bible with grand concepts, which he devours as hastily as he spits them out again—the God of Israel as a "transcendent instance," the law as "heteronomous normativity." Through Plato's Seventh Epistle, which is an indictment not of rhetoric but of writing, he gains distance from any established doctrine. Finally comes the question that frames the entire undertaking: "Philosopher contre la 'philosophie': cette phrase at-elle un sens?" Can one philosophize against philosophy as a discipline? This "thinking against itself" ultimately turns against philosophy as institutionalized certainty.

The resolution offered by the book in its final chapters is subtle and crucial for understanding Jewishness. The narrator initially believes he has come to terms with doubt, made a clean break, returned to the starting point of his journey—a “spiritual hara-kiri” from which he emerges victorious. But gradually he realizes that this break with illusions is incomplete. One cannot annul one's birth, remove existence from its contingency, or escape the spectre of vanity. No one is the creator of their own origin. One necessarily thinks against a mental backdrop, under the influence of the bonds forged throughout life. No rupture, no spiritual suicide, can negate this embodied nature of thought.

But this is precisely where Devers's point lies, and it is not a rejection of Judaism, but rather its transformation. Unlike religion, opinion, and ideology, philosophy is not a closed quest. Its lack of grounding is its primary richness. In the book's final dialogue, the narrator speaks with his "anti-moi," his religious doppelgänger with a beard and sidelocks, who appeared on Kippur night. The original title, rejected by the publisher, was "Histoire de mon suicide," the story of my suicide. But the narrator recognizes that it is not the story of a crime: "je marche dans tes pas"—I walk in your footsteps. Philosophy is not the opposite of religion, not the opposite of all hope. It traces the same quest on an open path; it continues your search by dissolving its framework. She does not reveal what breaks her: “Les idoles brisées s'incorporent à sa vie” – the broken idols enter her life and blaze in her poem.

Intertextuality: Judaism as a network of texts

The Jewishness of the book is not only biographical and thematic, but also highly intertextual. Devers' narrative is, from beginning to end, a tapestry of quotations, allusions, and readings, and it is precisely the Jewish references that form its densest network. One can distinguish several levels which together demonstrate that "thinking against oneself" is itself a profoundly text-bound, indeed a Talmudic, operation.

The programmatic framework: Genesis and Rimbaud

The exergue itself juxtaposes two sources and crosses them with a symbol: a verse from Genesis – “Car tu t'es battu avec Dieu et avec les hommes…”, for you wrestled with God and with men – and a phrase from Arthur Rimbaud – “… posséder la vérité dans une âme et un corps”, to possess truth in one soul and one body. This montage is the book's program in a nutshell. The first verse comes from the scene of Jacob's nighttime wrestling match at the Jabbok, at the end of which he receives the name Israel; the name etymologically means “he who wrestles with God.” By connecting this Jewish foundational myth of wrestling with God with Rimbaud's modern, poetic search for truth, Devers gives his own undertaking a dual origin. “Thinking against oneself” is thus identified as a form of struggle that originates both from the Hebrew Bible and from literary modernism.

The canonical texts as agents of action

The Torah, the Talmud, the commentaries of Rashi and Maimonides, and the prophets are not merely mentioned in the book, but are read, memorized, commented upon, and contrasted. They are active participants in the narrative. The kippah episode precisely references the Talmudic tractate Kiddushin, page 31a, Rav Huna, and his father Rav Yehoshua to interpret the wearing of the head covering as a "dome woven from humility." The narrator's decisive rupture is staged through a close reading of Ecclesiastes, with Ecclesiastes as the "Rassembleur," the assembler, with the figure of Solomon as a fictional author, and with the key word hevel, which French tradition renders as "vanity." The sacred text here is not a backdrop, but the intertextual lever with which the narrator dismantles his own faith. The Bible, as the chapter in Ecclesiastes states, breaks at its own most sublime point – a self-deconstruction of the canon from within.

The Jewish “apostates” as forbidden dissenting voices

A distinct group comprises Spinoza, Marx, and Freud, who are explicitly introduced in the book as "Juifs apostats," Jewish apostates. It is noteworthy that it is the Orthodox teacher Rav Kotmel himself who quotes them. In one of his few impassioned speeches, he explains that if these "free spirits" criticized Judaism, it was the fault of tradition: they had posed essential questions—those of immanence, ideology, and the unconscious—and the rabbis of their time had refused to address them. One must not flee from them, but confront them, whatever the risks. In this way, religious authority plants in the narrator the voices that foreshadow his later path. Spinoza, doubly present in the book and also invoked in the context of Descartes, functions as a historical prefiguration of Devers' own fate: the Jew excluded from the community who transgresses tradition using its own methods. Intertextuality here becomes irony – faith provides doubt with its reading list.

Levinas as an unspoken nexus

The reference to Emmanuel Levinas is particularly intricate. The ENIO, which in the book becomes the narrator's "second family," is the real institution, the École normale israélite orientale, where Levinas taught for decades and served as its director. The book explicitly mentions him: at the first conference of Rav Kotmel, Levinas's memory is invoked. Thus, the setting of the religious ascent is simultaneously the site of a Jewish philosophy that combines Talmudic reading and phenomenological thought. Levinas, who converged Torah and Husserl, Law and Heidegger, is the unspoken bridge over which the narrator himself later crosses when, in the same summer, he studies the Talmud in the original while simultaneously reading Husserl and Heidegger. The connection between "Torah" and "phenomenology" is not Devers's invention, but rather historically inscribed in this setting.

The rabbinic method as a form

Ultimately, the book's intertextuality is not only thematic but also formal and methodological. Devers's approach—a text sparked by another, interpreting it, and then turning against itself—is structurally Midrashic and Talmudic. The model is provided by Kotmel's reinterpretation of the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac: God never demanded that Abraham kill his son, but rather "bring him to a mountain as a burnt offering." That Abraham perceived this as a command to murder shows that, despite his monotheistic quest, he remained permeated by the "spirit of Babylon," in which humanity possesses no intrinsic value; the test serves precisely to banish this impulse. This reading reverses a traditional meaning by taking the text more closely than the tradition itself. Devers adopts precisely this approach for his entire book—only in the end, he turns it against the religion from which it originates. “Thinking against oneself” is therefore not a departure from Jewish hermeneutics, but its most consistent application: reading means breaking down a meaning, and the narrator ultimately breaks down the belief that taught him to read.

Conclusion: Jewishness as a figure of self-overcoming

Jewishness in PCS cannot be reduced to a denomination, a social affiliation, or a stage passed through. In the book, it is a figure of movement, specifically a movement against itself. As origin, it is accidental and atmospheric, a milieu that remains hidden from the outside world. As appropriation, it becomes a passionate, even addictive, devotion that transcends the inherited, lukewarm Judaism precisely through absolutization. Finally, as self-dissolution, it provides the tool of its own negation—through Ecclesiastes, through the vertigo of birth, through the suspicion that one's own faith is merely the phenomenon of a contingent origin.

What is remarkable is the internal logic of this path. The loss of faith is not narrated as a rebellion against religion, but as its most logical consequence. Religion ends where it is taken most seriously; the sincerity that drove the narrator into orthodoxy is the same sincerity that leads him out of it. The motif of exile that underlies the genealogy—the constantly shifting Jerusalem, identity as provisional, the desert as an experience of groundlessness—returns at the end as a philosophical stance: a thinking without a fixed foundation, without a goal, but also without limits, which allows the "desert" to become the "source."

Ultimately, Devers avoids the temptation to dismiss Judaism as merely a bygone stage. In the conciliatory final scene, the narrator implores his religious counterpart to no longer see him as an adversary. The ruptures, he writes, remain forever "nuits rouges," red nights that cannot be relived and cannot be forgotten, inhabiting a past they left behind as a seed. Jewishness is thus neither denied nor glorified: it is the lived and transcended form, from whose shattered idols the continued search draws its flame. "Thinking against oneself" finds in it not its enemy, but its origin.