France’s Chief Rabbi Declines to Resign Over Plagiarism
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Version 0 of 1. PARIS — The chief rabbi of France, under pressure to resign since he admitted plagiarizing parts of a book on Jewish meditations, acknowledged significant moral errors in a radio interview Tuesday night, but said he would not step down. Rabbi Gilles Bernheim said that although he had made mistakes, “I have not committed fault in the exercise of my functions” as France’s chief rabbi, a post he has filled since 2009. “To resign,” he said on Radio Shalom, “would be an act of vanity and desertion.” Nonetheless, he is still expected to face pressure to resign over the plagiarism and over lying about his academic achievements. The plagiarism concerns his 2011 book, “Forty Jewish Meditations.” In March, an Internet investigation revealed similarities between that work and an interview with the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in a 1996 book, “Questioning Judaism,” by Elizabeth Weber. Rabbi Bernheim at first suggested that Mr. Lyotard had essentially plagiarized from him, but then recanted. Another Web site then suggested that the rabbi had also used fragments of other books, by authors like Elie Wiesel and Jean-Marie Domenach, in the same work. At first, he denied the allegations forcefully. But last week, he conceded the error, blaming inadequate oversight of a student who did some of the writing, a common practice in France. He said he had hired the student because of a busy schedule and had not informed his publisher of the arrangement. “It is the one and only time I made such an arrangement,” he wrote in a statement. “It was a terrible mistake. I have been fooled. However, I am responsible.” In the statement, he also apologized for initially denying the accusation. “My reaction against the first evidence of plagiarizing was emotional, hasty and clumsy,” he said. “I retrospectively analyze it as denial.” The rabbi then asked the publisher to withdraw the book and said he would send his apologies to the widow of Mr. Lyotard, who died in 1998. Matters worsened, however, when it emerged this week that Rabbi Bernheim, 60, had claimed an academic achievement that he had not earned. His Who’s Who entry, based on information he provided, says he was awarded from the Sorbonne an “agrégation de philosophie,” an elite and highly competitive academic distinction. But there is no record that he won such an honor. As a philosopher, he wrote a well-received essay arguing against gay marriage. He cautioned about toying with the idea that gender has become “a social role that we choose for ourselves,” instead of “a given element of nature that man has to accept.” His essay was cited by Pope Benedict XVI in December in an address opposing same-sex marriage. But now there are charges that parts of that essay, too, were similar to the work of others. On Monday, a French Web site, Archeology of Cut and Paste, accused the rabbi of using passages close to those in a book by a priest, the Rev. Joseph-Marie Verlinde, “The Ideology of Gender: An Identity Received or Chosen.” Richard Prasquier, a friend of the rabbi and president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, appealed to him to set the record straight and spoke movingly of the “torment” the rabbi must feel. “Gilles Bernheim is my friend,” Dr. Prasquier said in an editorial on Tuesday in the organization’s newsletter. “A life like his cannot be hostage to a few failures in an area of intellectual or academic qualification related to his activity as a rabbi.” Dr. Prasquier said Rabbi Bernheim ought to be able to continue in his job, “where he has presented, in an eloquent voice, a Judaism open to the city and rigorous in its principles.” In the radio interview Tuesday night, Rabbi Bernheim said, “The story of the aggregation, of plagiarism, these are important moral facts, but I have not committed fault in the exercise of my functions.” Rabbi Bernheim was elected France’s chief rabbi in 2008 for a seven-year term by the Centrale Consistoire, created in 1808 by Napoleon to oversee Jews in France, who now number 600,000, the largest Jewish population in Europe. The turmoil comes at a time when organizations that monitor anti-Semitic episodes in France and Europe generally say that such incidents are on the rise. The American Jewish Committee has publicized a recent report by Tel Aviv University’s Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry that recorded what it terms 686 anti-Semitic attacks in Europe in 2012, compared with 526 in 2011, including physical violence and vandalism of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. |