On Simone Weil – Patrice Higonnet in NYRB (in 2021):

‘For Tocqueville, politics was the religion of the nineteenth century; religion, that is, of the left (revolutionary socialism); of the center (anticlerical republicanism); and of the right, which in France meant Catholicism. One of the most striking aspects of the long religious wars between 1789 and World War II was that those who believed in salvation through political works did not much believe in salvation through religious faith (or vice versa). One contemporary definition of modern saintliness can be found in the defiant position of those who have passionately and unreasonably yearned to combine these goals.
That is what Simone Weil tried to do. T.S. Eliot wrote of her “genius” that it was “akin to that of the saints,” as it surely was since her persistent wish—her obsession, in fact—was to take on the sins of the world in a highly personal drama of political and spiritual martyrdom. Joan of Arc died in 1431 to create a divinely ordained French nation; Simone Weil died a mystic’s death in 1943 wanting to help France find both the means to transcend its national failings and a renewed purpose. Few have worked more coherently, more learnedly, and more determinedly to achieve that goal. None is now likely to succeed more than she did. She was the last French saint.’

(…)

‘Her attitude toward her Jewish origins was even more complex and troubling. Militantly in favor of universal ideals (she was a dedicated opponent of French colonialism), fanatically hostile to all particularisms—religious, national, or racial—she was, as she explained in a defiant and insulting letter to Xavier Vallat, Vichy’s first commissioner for Jewish affairs, “foreign to Hebraic culture” and wholly committed to an ethical tradition that was “Christian, French, and Hellenic.” Indeed, she said, she did not know what the term “Jew” might mean, which was the standard response of Frenchified pro-republican Jews to anti-Semitic slurs. To the scandal of the Catholic priests who became her friends, she despised the Old Testament as much as she treasured the new one. She believed that Hebrew scribes had stolen the idea of Genesis from ancient Egypt. When confronted in Morocco by the Jewish rituals of her fellow refugees in 1942, she mocked them. Job was not really Jewish, she thought; and Christ, had he been incarnated in India, would not have been crucified but enthroned.’

(…)

‘Her views on Judaism as religion will seem curious to some, offensive to others. Her silence regarding the deportation of Jews, thousands of them children, from France in July and August 1942 must seem inexcusable to virtually everyone. Simone Weil had left France by then, but it is inconceivable that she did not know of the horrendous acts ordered by the Vichy vice-premier Pierre Laval: many French cardinals and bishops, who had shortly before praised Vichy’s Révolution nationale, both privately and publicly expressed their unease about these atrocities and—in some cases—their indignation. From London, where she was living from November 1942, the Free French Radio had also described the deportations in some detail. And yet, in the hundreds of pages that she wrote at the time, Weil hardly mentioned any of them, except to argue once more that the solution to “the Jewish problem” in France was the complete assimilation of French Jews.
Had Weil stayed on in France, would she have voluntarily chosen to join these victims? Had she lived on to 1945, would her change of heart on this score have been as complete as the one in which she belatedly shifted her position from unconditional pacifism to unconditional hostility to Hitler in March 1939? Or was her silence the perverse effect of her own code of self-denial?’

(…)

‘Hannah Arendt described Weil’s La Condition ouvrière as the “only book in the huge literature on the theme of factory work which deals with the problem without prejudice and sentimentality.” In the Middle Ages she might have been seen as the patron saint of lepers, and in our own times, of third-world migrants. In the 1930s, she wanted to be the patron saint of proletarians.’

(…)

‘Did Weil find Christ because Marx had failed? There is no clear answer to the question, but it is suggestive that in 1932, during a four-month stay in Hamburg (she spoke German and English fluently), and three years before the beginning of her conversion, Weil was already struck by the sad passivity of German workers, whom she saw lacking any sense of direction in their lives.’

(…)

‘She will, for obvious reasons, disturb those with worldly interests in power, fame, sex, or money; but she will also disturb those who have retreated from the mundane world because, for her, the path to salvation and detachment necessarily proceeded through universalist compassion and sincere camaraderie.
She disturbs non-Christians by the intelligence and authority with which she asserts the reality of the Christian word just as she disturbs Christians by her unmediated and self-destructive attempts to imitate a sacrificial Christ. She disconcerts liberals who want to use the state to improve society by arranging for the better production and distribution of material goods; and she disturbs those who hope to change the world for the better, since in the end, she voluntarily chose to give it up.’

(…)

‘Weil understood in the early summer of 1943 that she would not realize her hopes of being parachuted into occupied France (she was physically too inept and she looked too Jewish).’

(…)

‘He too was a Jewish convert to Catholicism. (De Gaulle, when Schumann had informed him of his decision to convert, had imperturbably replied, “Really; and to what religion?”) Another French friend placed a tricolor bouquet on her grave. A Catholic priest had also been asked to come, but he missed the train and her friends did without him.’

Read the article here.

The last French saint manages to annoy many indeed. There is something fascinating in her writings and her life.
Her belief in redemption through love can be irritating. But saints probably are irritating to those who are unable or unwilling to give up on worldly pleasures for higher ideals and higher pleasures.

And it's ironic that somebody who believed in total assimilation looked to Jewish to go back to occupied France. Her silence over the fate of the Jewish people in France is just proof that even saints have blind spots. Probably just like gods.