ABSTRACT
I often read learned books and articles that come from Eastern Europe. What strikes me most about the abundant production of these authors, artists, and thinkers, is their brilliance. This intelligence disturbs me a little, for I detect in it the expression of a historic distress. Twofold, threefold, or fourfold distress: recurring subjection, imposed ideological isolation, non-recognition by the rest of the world, or attribution of inferior status and, in spite of all that, a great history, a splendid cultural tradition, and an almost feverish intellectual vitality. Between the lines is the obsession with politics, the saga of persecutions. The resemblance with the Arab world is striking. In both cases, one can find a plethora of intellectuals, an effervescence and—underestimation; in both cases, there is a misfortune that is both real and fabricated. As for comparison on the scale of political history, it stops at the confines of modernity; indeed, at this very stretch of time that witnessed the advent of nationalities after the Great War. This was not the case for the historical foundations, or for the problem of origins that blur the self-image of the Arabs and the construction of their own modernity.
