After the Second World War, the appearance of the Jewish quarter of Brooklyn, its quiet streets lined with sycamores, its sandstone houses, its green gardens, changed. The Hasidic Jews who survived central Europe settled there with their caftans, their swirling dances. The intellectual atmosphere of American Judaism also changed under the influence of newcomers who defended a strict orthodoxy. No question for them to change an iota of the tradition in the name of which their families had been killed. Tensions arose with New York Jews studying the Talmud as a collection of discussions that needed to be pursued, not as a frozen text. A fascinating quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns as all religions know about it.
God transmitted the texts to the man so that he studies them, not so that he modifies them when he does not understand themIt is in this context that Reuven, the young narrator of La Promesse is looking for what he believes in, in which he can trust, how to remain faithful to the Jewish revelation without lying to himself and without forbidding himself
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