Today is a big day for Jewish pride. It is Emile Durkheim’s birthday.

Émile Durkheim was a son of a son of a rabbi. This legacy traced back eight generations and he himself was in a yeshiva studying to follow in the footsteps of his forebears. However, Jew-hatred directed him in a different direction. Durkheim wanted to both understand and explain the social systems of antisemitism.

This intellectual turn was fueled by his lived experience as a Jew in French Alsace-Lorraine. His Orthodox community coexisted peacefully with their gentile neighbors until the end of the Franco-Prussian War when his town had been temporarily occupied by Germans. The Jews were scapegoated for the losses and the rising wave of antisemitism both frightened and fascinated him. How had the minds of so many around him been radically reoriented simultaneously? It was almost as if their consciousnesses were not their own, but somehow interconnected. In working to understand this, one sees Durkheim’s orthodox upbringing shadowing his thought.

His question about the relation between individuality and collectivity would end up becoming the topic of his dissertation and then his life’s work as he became one of the founders of the field of sociology. His courses at the University in Bordeaux were the first ever in sociology taught in France.

Many rightly credit Marx as an influence on Durkheim. However, when engaging his work, one also finds the symbols and rituals of Durkheim’s orthodox upbringing lighting up his sociology. It’s easy to imagine him sitting in synagogue as well as living at home wondering about the enveloping symbols and surrounding rituals. He didn’t choose to be Jewish, but only how to be Jewish. The individual is affirmed by collective identity. Tension between community and individuals fascinated him.

Durkheim understood that each of us deliberate, choosing our actions while showing that these choices are made within cultural strictures that, while powerful, remain invisible to us. We are socialized from the youngest age to internalize social facts: behavioral norms that are enforced both formally and informally and become unquestioned presuppositions in our choices.

Little do we realize that Durkheim’s investigation........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)