Le récit de la Tour de Babel : réflexions sur le différentialisme juif et la question de la langue

International audienceThis article deals with the (too) well known story of the Tower of Babel and its rabbinical interpretation. The rabbis try above all to understand the nature of the sin committed by the builders of the Tower. However a few traditions focus on the meaning of transition from a single language to many tongues. The German-Jewish literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin was particularly interested by this topic in his midrashic essay Uber die Sprache und die Sprache des Menschen. According to the model of the French historian and anthropologist Emmanuel Todd, Jewish family structure belongs to the authoritarian type, which produces cultural differentialism. This model contributes to shed new light on ancient and modern Midrashim on Genesis 11