Point of (k)no(w) return: The politics of the Eliadean HoR
Preceded by some methodological skirmishes during the 1960s, mostly ignored by Eliade himself, a heated debate broke out in the 1970s when the Eliadean research programme became the object of vehement international attacks that questioned its epistemic consistency, the fideistic a priori, and the implicit socio-political tenets (e.g.
Leach 2006; Pernet 2011; cf. Turcanu 2007: 620-2; Ambasciano 2014: 166 n. 768). At the same time, morphological systems of classification and the phenomenological approach as a whole were being challenged as incoherent, incomplete or fallacious methods of social-scientific analysis (e.g. Penner and Yonan 1972; Penner 1989; cf. McCutcheon 1997). Paradoxically, Eliade’s works were becoming extremely popular among the youth counterculture, as they contributed to the shaping of the New Age’s syncretic spirituality. Rather reluctantly, Eliade became a ‘guru’ for a new, US post-war generation eager for non-mainstream figures, an academic persona whose ideas on the liberating power of myth were able to captivate the youth aspirations for spiritual and social renovation (Eliade 1982a: 109-11; see Turcanu 2007: 598). Carlo Ginzburg defined this paradox as the result of an Eliadean ‘ambivalent legacy’, strategically supported by the historian of religions himself during his lifetime (Ginzburg 2010). In order to achieve such a goal, Eliade kept on fictionalizing his biography, exploiting the serendipitously convenient difficult access to Interwar documents located beyond the Iron Curtain, taking advantage of the new Romanian People’s Republic regime to rebuild implicitly his identity as a victim of (a different) totalitarianism, rewriting his memoirs, and pursuing his idea of the HoR as a metatheological, saving discipline.A turning point in this pseudo-bibliographical narrative production was the publication of the so-called ‘Toladot dossier’ (‘Dosarul Mircea Eliade’), written in Romanian and published in early 1972 in the bilingual Israeli journal Toladot.
Buletinul Institutului Dr. J. Niemirower. Edited by Yad Vashem historian Theodor Lavi (Theodor Lowenstein; 1905-1983), the Toladot dossier was a partial collection of Interwar Romanian testimonies extracted from the diary of Eliade’s former acquaintance, Jewish writer and playwright Mihail Sebastian (Iosif Hechter; 1907-1945), which revealed the historian of religions' intellectual involvement and active participation in extreme-right politics (Scagno 2000: 281-9 for the dossier itself; see Ambasciano 2014: 299-300 n. 333; Idel 2014: 193-212). A copy of the Toladot dossier was to reach Eliade along with a letter sent to him on 25 June 1972, by his colleague, Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor of Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982). Prompted by Scholem's polite but seriously concerned letter, Eliade produced a long, and ultimately unconvincing, apology in which - as was discovered later - he lied about his own extreme-right past, denying any allegation concerning his Interwar political participation (an admission would have jeopardized Eliade's life and work in the USA; see Dubuisson 2014: 277-88; Junginger 2008: 38-9 for the context of the letters; cf. Ambasciano 2014: 357 n. 618, 482 n. 35; Scholem's letter is in Handoca 2006: 315-16).1 However, the knowledge of Eliade's political past circulated within European cultural and diplomatic entourages at least after his Parisian years, and got in the way of Eliade's potential academic affiliation in France (Spineto 2006: 34; Turcanu 2007: 441-2). Unsurprisingly, considering the shared disciplinary history, Italy found itself in the eye of the Toladot hurricane. The dossier achieved national resonance thanks to historians of religions Alfonso Maria di Nola and Furio Jesi. In 1977, di Nola took the opportunity of the concomitant Italian edition of Eliade's journal (1945-1969) and wrote a powerful j’accuse against the Eliadean web of reactionary politics and academic production, specifically underscoring that his critical reflections about the dossier wantedto invite the youth - and many among them, as a matter of fact - captivated by the spell cast by the Eliadean discourse, to the duty of remembering, to render memory and history as forms of knowledge.
[These notes] want to be of help in the discovery of the concealed roots of the evils that circulate amongst us and which might bring back - without even noticing it - a renewed sleep of reason, producer of monsters.di Nola 1977b: 15, my emphasis; see also di Nola 1977c
Two years later, Jesi, in his book entitled Cultura di destra (Right-Wing Culture), delved deeper into the Eliadean worldview in the wake of the Toladot dossier, bringing to light previously omitted connections between the Eliadean socio-political, rightwing mindset and his academic mythological machine (Jesi 2011; cf. Rowland 2014; see Chapter 1, §Maps, compasses and bricks). Notwithstanding some factual inaccuracies and wild guesses due to the incomplete knowledge of Eliade's Interwar production, the volume was a cultural watershed and had a significant impact on the reception of Eliade's works (Manera 2012). Eliade, once made aware of such a book (which he did not read), believed that Jesi's ‘campaign' and ‘perfidious attack' was aimed at ‘eliminating]' him from the preliminary evaluation for the Nobel Prize in Literature during the late 1970s (personal notes, resp. dated 23 July 1979 and 6 June 1979; from Eliade 1990b: 22, 16; cf. Ricketts 2000b: 375 and Turcanu 2007: 606-11, 627-9; on the late-1970s Nobel Prize nomination, see Handoca 1998: 122-3).2 In 1989, another article by di Nola summarized the growing interpretive literature on the Toladot dossier, noting a polarizing increase in both the use of logically fallacious immunizing strategies and critical scholarship, respectively for and against Eliade's research programme (di Nola 1989). Meanwhile, the international academic environment continued to support a generally sympathetic view with regard to the Eliadean paradigm (e.g. Bianchi was elected President of the IAHR in 1990).
Thanks to a disciplinary environment built in a way not dissimilar to Schmidt's research complex, Eliade kept on wilfully ignoring every criticism, favouring instead confirmatory scholarship (e.g.
Eliade 1978b). Indeed, there was no reason to do otherwise. Since the 1960s, Eliade had received awards from prestigious academic institutions on a regular basis, accumulating academic honours such as the election to the American Academy of Arts and Science (1966) and the appointment as Corresponding Fellow at the British Academy (1970). Eliade was also awarded honorary degrees from Yale University (1966); Universidad de la Plata, Argentina (1969); Ripon College, Wisconsin (1969); Loyola University, Chicago (1970); Boston College (1971); La Salle College, Philadelphia (1972); Oberlin College, Ohio (1972); University of Lancaster (1975); La Sorbonne, Paris (1976) (Burgess 1989: 248; Spineto 2006: 72). On top of that, in 1985, an anonymous donation of one million dollars allowed the trustees of the University of Chicago to establish the ‘Mircea Eliade Chair in the History of Religions' in his honour at the local Divinity School (Turcanu 2007: 646).However, in the same year, Eliade finally acknowledged in a private note that his non-confrontational strategy was backfiring (15 September 1985; in Eliade 1990b: 143). The strategic promotion of Eliade's students to occupy academic positions all across the US also turned out to rebound on him (Turcanu 2007: 575). In the wake of the Toladot dossier, critical scholarship interested in uncovering the Romanian Interwar roots and continuities in Eliade's thoughts gained momentum between the 1980s and the 1990s thanks to the increasing success of Eliade's works, the growing group of students and scholars interested in reconstructing his life, and the ongoing biobibliographical systematizations of his production (the most impressive products of the period probably being the ‘annotated bibliography' by Douglas Allen and Dennis Doeing, 1980, and the 2-volume Romanian-years biography in Ricketts 2004, originally published in 1988; see Turcanu 2007: 623-4, 629-39, 643-4; cf. Ambasciano 2014: 298). Regardless of the defence strategies deployed by Eliade's supporters (recently reviewed in Bordas 2012), and even if some of the original allegations were demonstrated to be wide of the mark (e.g.
Strenski 2004; Spineto 2006: 43-4), the long-awaited republication of some among Eliade's most remarkable Interwar works has confirmed the picture resulting from the Toladot dossier, demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that the Eliadean research programme had its roots in the reactionary sociopolitical ideology in which he vehemently and fervently believed (Handoca 2001; cf. Ambasciano 2014).As a result, to summarize, Eliade's original idea of what the morphological and phenomenological HoR should have been is confirmed as that of an instrumentum regni for the elite and by the elite, where historians of religions were actively engaged ex cathedra as the academic longa manus of ultranationalism to study and classify subordinate peoples and their supernatural knowledge, whether folk peasants at home or ‘primitives' abroad, for the greater good and excellence of a divinely inspired, new Romanian nation (e.g. Handoca 2008: 330-2, 335). Eliade never disavowed his extremeright political belief in the creation of a ‘new man' within the spiritual renovation of humankind; he only became bitterly disillusioned after the defeat of the Axis powers and began rethinking in religious terms the aim and scope of the discipline (e.g. Eliade 2010), while continuing to collaborate with extreme right-wing scholars and journals, camouflaging his creed to rebuild an acceptable reputation in the mutated sociopolitical context, and pursuing opportunistically the same conservative agenda (Turcanu 2007: 576-9; Gardaz 2012; Strenski 2015: 152; cf. Ambasciano 2014).3