Our Civilization: European or 'Judeo-Christian'?

by Henri Levavasseur

Henri Levavasseur contests the widespread characterization of Europe as a "Judeo-Christian" civilization, arguing that its roots run deeper and older — reaching back through Greek thought, the Roman model, and a shared Indo-European heritage that predates Christianity by millennia.

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The use of the notion of “Judeo-Christianity” stems from a questionable shortcut, unsuited to defining the essence of our civilization — which should quite simply be qualified as European, without attaching other reductive qualifiers to it.

At a time when the activity of Islamist networks of influence, fed on our soil by decades of mass immigration, is coupled with a tremendous rise in “intellectual terrorism” practiced by “deconstructionist” militants (cancel culture, racialist anti-racism, “ultra” feminism, etc.), the continuity of the ethnic and cultural identity of the European peoples is gravely threatened. Nevertheless, courageous voices are rising in ever greater numbers to call for the defense of our civilizational identity — which many writers, thinkers, and polemicists then readily describe as “Judeo-Christian.”

Is it, however, accurate and pertinent to define European civilization in this way? Must the latter be essentially conceived as being of “Judeo-Christian” origin?

We do not think so, for two principal reasons — one pertaining to the history of the European peoples, the other to the history of religions.

It is indeed worth recalling, first of all, that the roots of European civilization predate Christianity.

The languages spoken today by the European peoples (Romance, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and Baltic languages, along with modern Greek) belong in their overwhelming majority (with the exception of Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian) to the family of “Indo-European” languages, meaning that they almost all derive from a common mother tongue more than 5,000 years old. And inasmuch as language structures thought, this heritage constitutes an essential dimension of our civilization.

Moreover, no migration or colonization originating outside the Indo-European sphere has been massive enough — among those that have affected certain regions of Europe over the past five millennia — to radically upset the composition of the European population at the continental scale (with the exception of the migratory waves of recent decades, which constitute an unprecedented phenomenon in the long history of Europe — precisely since the era of the diffusion of the Indo-European languages). This finding is today unequivocally confirmed by the results of the most recent paleogenetic studies. Most Europeans are therefore not merely speakers of an Indo-European language (as are the African-American populations that communicate in English), but also the descendants of “Indo-European” ancestral lineages, autochthonous for millennia.

The peoples of Europe reached an advanced stage of civilization as early as the Bronze Age, more than three thousand five hundred years ago.

With regard to the development of the sciences and the arts, but also in the domain of the great principles of social and political organization, Europe is moreover the heir of Greek thought and of the Roman model — both of which likewise predate Christianity.

The sites of Stonehenge, of the Parthenon, and of the Roman Forum were erected well before the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. They stand as tangible testimonies to the antiquity of our civilization.

This is not to dismiss the importance of external influences — particularly Eastern ones — that have acted upon European civilization at various stages of its history: no civilization develops without contact with its neighbors, with whom it maintains by turns conflictual or peaceful relations, which necessarily leads to a permanent interplay of mutual influences. That said, European civilization is quite distinct from those that surround it; it possesses its own identity, and the influences it has received or transmitted over the centuries must not lead us to overlook the specificity of that identity.

In this respect, Christianity does not belong to the “roots” of Europe, but rather constitutes a “graft” that naturally altered the growth of the tree onto which it was implanted at an already advanced stage of its multi-millennial development.

Here again, this observation is not meant to call into question the importance of the Christian contribution within our civilization. The latter would doubtless be very different from what it has become (for better or for worse — no one can say) had this “graft” not occurred. Thrilling at the memory of our distant forebears before the spectacle of the ruins of Stonehenge or the Parthenon in no way prevents one from feeling the same kind of emotion beneath the vaults of the cathedral of Chartres. Admiring Homer or Aristotle does not entail renouncing one’s appreciation for Saint Thomas Aquinas or Pascal. Let us add (something that unfortunately no longer goes without saying in this era of civilizational collapse, when we are subjected to the dictates of the “intellectual terrorists” inspired by the deliriums from across the Atlantic) that one may admire a thinker without necessarily sharing all of his analyses.

Let us even recall this self-evident point: to recognize that the “roots” of European civilization are older than Christianity does not forbid one from being Christian oneself, nor does it call into question the validity of Catholic dogmas for all those who adhere to them. It is a finding that belongs to the order of historical analysis, not to that of faith or religion: it is a matter of recognizing that European civilization BECAME Christian — that is, that its historical destiny cannot be dissociated from the Christian contribution — while acknowledging that the first developments of this civilization, which constitute our most distant heritage, predate the arrival of Christianity in Europe.

Conversely, nor must it be forgotten that Christianity received a great deal from Europe in taking root on its soil: to be convinced of this, one need only measure the importance of its borrowings from Greek thought, from “Roman” modes of organization (in their “Western” and “Eastern” variants), as well as from local traditions in the realm of “popular piety” — from the first centuries of the Church down to our own day, among Catholics and Protestants as well as among the Orthodox.

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The second reason why the civilizational identity of Europe cannot be qualified as “Judeo-Christian” rests upon another observation — that of the rejection of the Christian message by post-Christic Judaism.

It is no insult to Judaism to recall that, from the beginning of our era, it developed in opposition to Christianity — whose dogmas and articles of faith it rejects for numerous reasons, upon the validity of which the historian has no business pronouncing.

This does not of course mean that relations between the faithful of the two religions have always been conflictual across the centuries, nor that Christians have not pursued an often fruitful intellectual dialogue with representatives of Judaism (as has moreover also been the case with certain Muslim elites, without anyone feeling the need to speak of “Islamo-Christianity”).

No one will deny that many Jews have contributed in eminent fashion to the development of European civilization, whether in the artistic, scientific, or economic domains. For all that, this does not make Judaism as such — particularly in its “post-Christic” version — a primary source of our civilization. The fact that Christian monotheism developed out of Jewish roots does not entail that one must necessarily speak of “Judeo-Christianity”: would it even occur to our contemporaries to invoke the existence of a “Judeo-Islamism”?

And yet Islam is, in many respects, much closer to Judaism than Christianity has remained since its implantation in Europe. Muslim monotheism proceeds fairly directly from the inspiration of Jewish monotheism, whereas Christianity departed on numerous essential points from its Jewish roots — in particular with the idea of the Incarnation: the image of Christ, “true God and true man,” is just as unthinkable for Judaism as for Islam. Let us note in passing that historians of religion have occasionally advanced the hypothesis of an influence exerted upon early Judaism by ancient Iranian civilization — itself of Indo-European origin — which underwent an early “monotheistic” evolution of its own with Zoroastrianism: matters are therefore not simple in this domain.

If Judaism has exerted a certain influence on Western civilization on several occasions in the course of its history (notably at the moment of the revival of Hebrew studies in the wake of Renaissance humanism), it is worth noting that the Jewish communities settled in Europe have themselves been largely imbued with European culture — which endowed them with an identity distinct from those of the communities that remained outside Europe.

Judaism and Islam are nevertheless distinguished on one fundamental point in their relation to Christian Europe, inasmuch as Islam has virtually never ceased, since its first phase of expansion, to represent a military and civilizational threat to the Christian world — whether the Byzantine Empire or the medieval West. Let us recall that the Moorish conquest of Spain long predates the first crusades, and that the Ottoman Empire occupied a significant portion of Balkan Europe even before the fall of Constantinople.

Nothing comparable, assuredly, occurred in the context of the relations between the various Jewish communities and Christian Europe.

For all that, the use of the notion of “Judeo-Christianity” seems to us to stem from a questionable shortcut, unsuited to defining the essence of our civilization — which should quite simply be qualified as European, without attaching other reductive qualifiers to it.

Judaism has not played a sufficiently decisive and direct role in Europe’s identity for us to define the latter on the basis of religious, ethnic, or civilizational references that are ultimately distinct from its own roots. This does not of course mean that the Jewish communities settled in Europe for centuries have not become perfectly European. It is simply a matter of not inverting the relationship of influence and of historical antecedence by qualifying our civilization as “Judeo-Christian” — which stems from a twofold intellectual confusion. It would, all things considered, be more in keeping with historical reality to invoke the notion of Helleno-Christianity, given the major borrowings made by Christian theology from the Greek philosophical tradition, even if Latin naturally imposed itself as the language of the Church in the Christian West.

Moreover, to recall that Europe has from the outset maintained conflictual relations with the Muslim world does not imply considering Islam exclusively in this light: geopolitical imperatives may of course lead European nations to treat as allies certain powers belonging to the Muslim civilizational sphere — which moreover scarcely presents any unity, whether on the religious, linguistic, ethnic, or political plane. This observation obviously does not imply recognizing Islam as a component of our civilization, despite the presence of numerous Muslims on European soil (a presence which, in most cases, is recent on the scale of history). One may perfectly well be Muslim and a citizen of a European country, but this can in no way lead to considering France a “Muslim country” (contrary to the appalling remarks recently made by a French ambassador to a Nordic country, following the debates on “Muslim separatism” provoked by the Islamist attacks committed in our country).

It is evident that the massive migratory waves originating from “lands of Islam,” which have penetrated European soil for half a century with the more or less active complicity of the political, economic, intellectual, media, and even religious elites, place Europe before the threat of a radical modification of its ethnic and cultural identity. It is not certain that it would be possible to narrow the fracture caused by fifty years of betrayals and dereliction by resorting to a biased definition of the origins of our civilization.

Contrary to the admonitions of the thurifers¹ of “republican” integration, this fracture does not correspond to some future risk that would proceed from the “identitarian” withdrawal of certain Europeans. This fracture has ALREADY taken place, and it is the result of fifty years of mad migration policy. Does this mean that this fracture places us in an irremediable situation? Ought we, as some urge us to do, to deny its gravity in the hope of limiting its consequences?

The Institut Iliade proposes another path: one which consists in inviting Europeans not only to recover the memory of their past, but above all to reappropriate for the future the virtues that allowed their civilizational genius to unfold more than five thousand years ago.

The adventure is not over, but the hour is decisive; it demands the greatest lucidity. Let us no longer pay ourselves with words, and let us renounce the verbal facilities that lead us astray. The concept of “Judeo-Christian civilization” is empty of meaning when it comes to defining the collective identity of our peoples. Let us dare to promote, embody, and defend EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION, whose origins have been marvelously brought to light by the works of Georges Dumézil and Émile Benveniste.²

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Originally published by the Institut Iliade in March, 2021.

Translated by Alexander Raynor

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1. [Translator’s note: thurifers — literally those who carry the censer in liturgical processions; figuratively, sycophants or fawning apologists'].

2. Let us recall, for the benefit of any “vigilant” censors to whom this information may have escaped, that the linguist Émile Benveniste — author of a magisterial study on the Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions) (Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969) — was born in Aleppo in 1902 to two parents who were teachers for the Alliance Israélite [TN: "Alliance Israélite" — the author's abbreviation for the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a Paris-based French-Jewish organization founded in 1860 that operated an extensive network of schools for Jewish communities across the Mediterranean basin, the Near East, and North Africa.]. Naturalized French in 1924, this great scholar honored his adopted homeland through the quality of his works. While this eminent example demonstrates that it is possible for a few exceptional individuals to BECOME European, it does not however lead us to think that the civilizational identity of Europe is reduced to the caricature of a great melting pot.