The Frankfurt Reform rabbi Elisa Klapheck recently published a book entitled Zur politischen Theologie des Judentums (“On the Political Theology of Judaism”), which the publisher promotes by means of the following remarks:
The Diaspora is advancing as a model of pluralistic globalization, and even the principled justification of women’s rights and minority rights may be seen as being grounded in Judaism’s reservoir of ideas. It demonstrates remarkable relevance for orientation in contemporary political crises.
This blurb may pars pro toto testify to the fact that, first of all, before one discusses the relationship between nation and religion in Judaism, it has to be stated that today’s prototypical Westerner (if he still deserves this term) is by no means likely to think of the principle of nationality when he thinks of Judaism. In many cases, one even encounters the denial of Judaism’s national character.
There are numerous reasons for this, some of them historical, but among them stand out the efforts of a certain faction of Judaism itself (to which, for example, the aforementioned Elisa Klapheck belongs). In particular, it is largely thanks to the efforts of Reform Judaism, which emerged from the German Jewry of the 19th century striving for assimilation, and whose representatives frequently propagate ‘diasporism’ or even militant anti-Zionism today.
As young as this tradition may be by Jewish standards, there are a number of biblical passages that Reform Jews refer to in order to prove the quasi-supranational character of Judaism, most prominently the call of God to Abram: Lech lecha mi Moledetcha (“Go forth from your land, your relatives, and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.” Gen. 12:1), or the line “For you were sojourners in Egypt,” which appears repeatedly throughout the scriptures (for the first time Ex. 23:9). Mostly, however, Reform Judaism takes these passages completely out of context; Abram, for example, leaves Charan in order to let God show him the promised land, i.e., to put down roots there, and not to wander about homeless afterwards. And as far as the passage from the Second Book of Moses is concerned, it is widely known how the Jews had fared as “sojourners in Egypt.” It is therefore a gross distortion to present the corresponding passages as pleas (or justification) for migrant existence.
As a contrast to the above, it is worth recalling some other biblical passages. The modern, if not entirely contemporary, dichotomy between forest and desert can be contrasted with a biblical one, which the writer Chaim Noll elaborated a few years ago in his opus magnum, Die Wüste. Literaturgeschichte einer Urlandschaft des Menschen (“The Desert. A Literary History of a Primordial Human Landscape”): namely, a dichotomy between city and desert, whereby the desert in this case does not stand for nomadism but for metaphysical contemplation and, as strange as it may sound, sedentariness (because in the stone desert, which is mainly meant here, it is still possible to cultivate the earth and maintain a stable living). The city, on the other hand, is coded—for the first time in the episode about Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah—as distant from God and corrupt.
Moreover, Israel’s hereditary enemy, Amalek, is a nomadic people, as Thomas Mann does not fail to point out in his Joseph and His Brothers. In the Book of Judges, chapter 7, this circumstance is taken into account in great detail. Under the judge Gideon, “Midjan, in addition to Amalek and all sons of the east,” march against Israel. On God’s instruction, Gideon eavesdrops on two of the enemy soldiers encamped in tents the night before battle. He hears one of them tells the other: “I had a dream,” he said, “that a round loaf of barley bread was rolling into the camp of Midian. It came to a certain tent and struck it and turned it upside down, and the tent collapsed.” The barley bread that Gideon and his Jewish men refer to stand for peasantry and thus settled life (sedentarism), while the tent of the Midianites and Amalek symbolizes nomadic existence.
All this may serve only as an example; there are quite a few other passages that one could refer to. I explain all this only as a lead to the actual topic, namely the dualistic character of Judaism. In my eyes, the most lucid, at any rate the most interesting Jew who has spoken about this is the historian Hans Joachim Schoeps. In his essay Wir deutsche Juden (“We German Jews”) of 1934, originally a reply to the left-wing Zionist Joachim Prinz—though also directed against Jewish assimilationists—Schoeps developed a kind of modified neo-orthodoxy, which strove to keep the balance between the two poles of Judaism, which he worked out on the basis of two Jewish pilgrimage festivals, Passover and the festival of Shavuot (forty-nine days later), on which we celebrate the receipt of the Torah at Mount Sinai/Horeb. Concerning Passover, Schoeps writes:
Jewry celebrates the hour of its ethnic birth, the feast of our liberation, that we have become one people. But at Sinai, the people became the one people. No one can understand Passover without Shavuot, any more than Shavuot without Passover. What is Horeb without Mizrajim [=Egypt], and what is Mizrajim without Horeb? Only Zionists can afford to consider Passover detached as a ethnic birth, provided they have confused Israel with the nations, and only liberals can afford to consider Shavuot detached as the birth of the Jewish religious society, provided they have confused Israel with a mere denomination. But the Jew in his true form knows that Passover and Shavuot belong indissolubly together …. In this duality the Jewish existence stands. Jewish existence has two roots, it is bipolar.
It is of great importance to note at this point that the Zionists mentioned by Schoeps, especially in Germany, were almost exclusively atheistic or even anti-theistic socialists at the time. Thus, Schoeps was writing here against, on the one hand, a kind of left-wing nationalism, and on the other hand, a liberal forgetfulness of history, while today’s Zionism, as one can easily recognize in the incumbent Israeli government, is dominated by Jewish orthodoxy.
What Schoeps emphasizes is the dualism between religion and nation or, more generally, between universalism and particularism, that exists within Judaism, this “covenant people,” as he calls it. Other authors also refer to the same contradiction. Gershom Scholem, for example, speaks of “utopia and restoration,” both of which are inherent in Judaism. And not even the most particularistic interpretation of Judaism ever presented completely denies the universalistic element. The Nietzschean Oskar Goldberg interprets the gods of the Middle East in his main work, Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer (“The Reality of the Hebrews”) (1925), as “biological centers” of their respective peoples. Characteristic of the original (and, according to Goldberg, true) Judaism is monolatry—or in Spenglerian terms, ‘henotheism’ (characteristic of magical culture, according to Spengler): the existence of other gods is not denied, but only one God is served. Goldberg also emphasizes the strict rejection of any ‘mission’ that characterizes Judaism. But even Goldberg does not deny that in Judaism alone, unlike in the case of other henotheistic peoples, God is not a biological center but a chosen one; thus Goldberg also takes into account the covenant character of Judaism.
Such a dichotomy must inevitably have specific implications for Judaism’s view of history; and, significantly, no one has stated this more succinctly than the Jewish historian Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who converted to Christianity: “For the Jew alone there is no dichotomy between the supreme image placed before his soul and the people into which his life leads him. He alone has the unity of myth which the peoples of the world lost and had to lose through Christianity; had to—for the myth they possessed was pagan myth which, leading them into themselves, led them away from God and from the neighbour.” With the Jew, on the other hand, myth and God are one.
In terms of the historiography of religion, a successive imbalance can be observed between these two poles of Judaism. At first, in the earliest writings, the Five Books of Moses and also the older parts of the rest of the Old Testament, henotheism dominates. In Psalm 96, for example, it says: Nora hu al kol elohim, “To fear HIM above all gods.” The existence of other gods is not denied; although the truth of the Jews surpasses that of the nations, each nation possesses its own truth.
The younger the text, however, the rarer are the henotheistic passages. At the same time, starting with the prophetic books, an increase of the universalistic–anarchic, or according to Scholem, “utopian” element can be noted. In 2011, the philosopher and CATO author Siegfried Gerlich, in his essay On the Political Theology of Judaism, aptly spoke of a “radicalization logic of this early messianism, which escalated from prophecy to apocalypticism and then to gnosis.”
Nietzsche also took this circumstance into account when he spoke of the degeneracy or decadence of Judaism:
Under the hands of the Jewish priests, the great time in the history of Israel became a time of decay: the exile, the long misfortune, turned into an eternal punishment for the great time—a time in which the priest was still nothing … They have turned the mighty, really free-spirited figures of the history of Israel, according to their need, into pathetic creatures or ‘godless ones.’
Nietzsche’s dictum was followed by a flood of reinterpretations of the Bible, referred to as counter-history by researchers today and originating mainly from the circles of cultural Zionism, which are characterized by a more positive evaluation of the kings and a more negative one of the prophets. However, and this is also emphasized by researchers, this counter-history was not understood as directed against Judaism but, on the contrary, as a return to a more original Judaism. And if one takes into account that, in contrast to the Muslims, the older a passage in the canon is, the more authoritative it is considered, this approach also has some justification.
Cultural Zionism then transferred the Nietzschean philosophy of decadence to the Diaspora and pathologized the accompanying intellectualism. And not only by cultural Zionism; for Schoeps also maintained: “The Jewish tribe has slipped from the masculine to the feminine side of existence is one of the peculiarities of world history.”
In secularized times, or since the beginning of modernity, the utopian pole of Judaism and its consolidation under the conditions of centuries of diaspora led to a substitute messianism—first and foremost to socialism. The reasons for the excessive participation of Jews both in the theoretical formulation of socialism and, for example, in the October Revolution, are partly sociological, but not least theological. This fact has not escaped the attention of the recent political right, to which Lorenz Jäger’s volume of essays Zur politischen Theologie jüdischer Intellektueller (“On the Political Theology of Jewish Intellectuals”) bears witness.
However, it was again Schoeps who insistently emphasized, “It is not Judaism that has a disintegrating and dissolving spirit, but people who are uprooted and detached from Judaism can have it.” And in more detail: “The Jew who does not want to be himself, but wants to get away from himself and deny himself—in whatever form and for whatever desired image—destroys his own kind and that of others. Because he has no kind, he tends to dissolve all kinds.”
Zionism, which finally asserted itself within Judaism about 75 years ago, led to a resurgence of the particularist-national element in Judaism. Even today, a substitute messianism can still be found among Jews (only as green and not as red socialism); just think of George Soros. But the state of Israel, which in recent decades has gained increasing weight not only militarily and economically, but also spiritually, is self-confidently defending itself against representatives of universalist Judaism: Soros is not persona non grata in the Jewish state by chance. And the law on the nation state was passed there a few years ago completely unmoved by the loud howling of left-wing Diaspora Jews.
However, if we consider this rather un-Western history of Judaism (because henotheism is undoubtedly un-Western), the question arises whether Spengler was not possibly correct in his assessment that Judaism simply belongs to magical culture. And what I would like to offer here is by no means a hypocritical ecumenism which emphasizes the similarities and omits the differences. We call the corresponding formats—since Muslims are now also involved in them—‘interreligious tria-lies’ (Trialüg).
One possible approach to forcing Judaism and Catholicism into an irreconcilable dichotomy is offered by Leo Naphtha, a character from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, incidentally a Jewish convert to Catholicism, who approvingly cites a superior general of the Jesuit order: “Patriotism is a plague and the surest death of Christian love.” However, the number of Catholics who would agree with this dictum is likely to be small, because even if secularism and the nation state have historically gone hand in hand in the West, today’s European Left, unlike in the 19th century, has little appreciation for the nation state. Catholicism and the nation state are no longer on opposite sides of the barricades, since the concept of a Europe of fatherlands seems to be quite compatible with the idea of the Church—and the non-secular nation state is also clearly the form of state that best corresponds to the true political theology of Judaism.
