Jewish Cryptotheologies ofLate ModernityPhilosophical Marranos

Agata Bielik-Robson

First published 2014by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2014 Agata Bielik-Robson

The right of Agata Bielik-Robson to be identi!ed as author of this work hasbeen asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced orutilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, nowknown or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or inany information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writingfrom the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks orregistered trademarks, and are used only for identi!cation and explanationwithout intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataBielik-Robson, Agata.Jewish cryptotheologies of late modernity : philosophical Marranos /Agata Bielik-Robson.pages cm -- (Routledge Jewish studies series)Includes bibliographical references and index.1. Jewish philosophy--20th century. I. Title.B5800.B54 2014181’.06--dc232013049988

ISBN: 978-1-138-77449-0 (hbk)ISBN: 978-1-315-77446-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Romanby Taylor and Francis Books

Contents

Acknowledgments ixList of abbreviations x

Introduction: Jewish clinamen, or the third languageof Jewish philosophy 1

PART IMyth, tragedy, revelation 39

1 Individuation through sin: Hermann Cohen betweentragedy and messianism 41

2 ‘Job-like questions’: The place of negativityin Rosenzweig 63

3 Revolution of trauma: Walter Benjamin andthe Tragic Gnosis 84

PART IIThe antinomian spectre 123

4 The antinomian symptom: Lévinas’ divine comedyof violence 125

5 The identity of the Spirit: Taubes betweenapocalyptics and historiosophy 166

6 The !re and the lightning rod: Tarrying withthe apocalypse 213

PART IIIJewish modernity 231

7 The promise of the name: ‘Jewish nominalism’ as the critiqueof idealist tradition 233

8 Another nihilism: Disenchantment in Jewish perspective 255

9 Jewish Ulysses: Post-secular meditation on the loss of hope 292

Bibliography 319Index of names 331Index of terms 336

viii Contents

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Karen Kilby for her constant encouragement; ChristopherThornhill for his wonderful editorial job and great patience; Adam Lipszycfor his harsh intellectual friendship; my husband, Cezary Michalski, for longand inspiring discussions; and, last but not least, Oliver Leaman for his helpand support without which this book would not have appeared.

A smaller version of the chapter “‘Job-like Questions’: The Place ofNegativity in Rosenzweig” appeared as “Oedipus Meets Job. On NeighbourlyRelations between Jews and Greeks in Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption,”in Dialogsphilosophie, Rosenzweig Jahrbuch No. 7, Münich: Herder Verlag,2013.

A part of the chapter “The Revolution of Trauma: Walter Benjamin and theTragic Gnosis” appeared as “The Unfallen Silence. Kinah and the Other Originof Language” in Lament in Jewish Thought. Philosophical, Theological, andLiterary Perspectives, eds. Illit Ferber and Paula Schwebel, Haag: de Gruyter,2014.

A fragment of the chapter “The Identity of the Spirit: Taubes betweenApocalyptics and Historiosophy” appeared as “Modernity: The JewishPerspective,” in New Blackfriars, No. 1 (2013), Oxford: Blackwell.

A smaller version of the chapter “The Fire and the Lightning Rod: Tarryingwith the Apocalypse” appeared as “Tarrying with the Apocalypse. The WaryMessianism of Rosenzweig and Lévinas,” Journal for Cultural Research No. 3(2009).

An earlier version of the chapter “The Promise of the Name: ‘JewishNominalism’ as the Critique of Idealist Tradition” appeared in Bamidbar.Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, No. 3 (2012), Vienna: PassagenVerlag.

I would like to thank all these publishers for allowing me to reuse thefragments of my work in the book.

List of abbreviations

CC Jacob Taubes, From Cult to Culture: Fragments Towards aCritique of Historical Reason, ed. Aleida Assmann, Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2009

DE Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic ofEnlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott,ed. G. Schmid Noerr, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002

GP Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, in Of God WhoComes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo, Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1998

GS Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Sieben Bände,Vol. I–VI,ed. Rolph Tiedemann and Hermann Shweppenhäuser, Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–1991

IL Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Re"ections, trans.Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968

JJC Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: SelectedEssays, ed. Werner Dannhauser, New York: Schocken Books,1976

LMA Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans.Robert M. Wallace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985

LY Gershom Scholem, Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries ofGershom Scholem, 1913–1919, ed. and trans. Anthony DavidSkinner, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007

MIJ Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And OtherEssays on Jewish Spirituality, New York: Schocken Books,1995

MM Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Re"ections on aDamaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, London: Verso, 2005

MT György Lukács, ‘Metaphysics of Tragedy’, in Soul and Form,trans. Anna Bostock, Merlin Press: London, 1974

ND Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton,London: Routledge, 1990

NTR Emmanuel Lévinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. AnnetteAronowicz, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990

OB Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence,trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague: Martinus Nijho", 1981

OE Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko,Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009

OG Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans.John Osborne, London: Verso, 1998

R Walter Benjamin, Re"ections: Essays, Aphorisms, Auto-biographical Writings, New York: Schocken Books, 1978

RR Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources ofJudaism, trans. Simon Kaplan, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press,1995

SR Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W.Hallo, Notre Dame and London: University of Notre DamePress, 1985

SW1–4 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vols. 1-4, ed. HowardEiland and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1996–2003

SU Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony Nassar,Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000 (translation basedon the second revised edition of Der Geist der Utopie, 1923)

TB Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfenbis 1923. 2 Halbband 1917–1923, Frankfurt am Main: JüdischerVerlag, 2000

TI Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and In!nity: An Essay on Exter-iority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague: Martinus Nijho",1991

TO Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘The Trace of the Other’, trans. AlphonsoLingis, in Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy,ed. Mark C. Taylor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1986

TP Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. DanaHoländer, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003

U Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels,Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978

UL James Joyce, Ulysses, New York: Vintage International, 1990USH Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy:

A View of World, Man, and God, trans. Nahum Glatzer,Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999

List of abbreviations xi

IntroductionJewish clinamen, or the third languageof Jewish philosophy

Let me begin with two poems.The !rst was created by Judah Halevi, the legendary 12th-century Jewish-

Spanish poet writing both in Hebrew and Arabic, and a great defender ofJewish faith against Hochmat Yevanit, the false ‘Greek wisdoms’ of philoso-phy. The title of this poem is Your Words Are Perfumed Like Myrrh, whereGod is the addresse, and the fragment in which Halevi criticizes the Greeksgoes as follows:

Let not Greek wisdom entice theeWhich bears no fruit but only blossoms.Its upshot is that the earth was never stretched forthThat the tents of heaven were not extended,That there is no beginning to creation,And no end to renewal of the moons.Hear the words of her confused sages,Built on shallow and hollow foundation,And you will turn away with heart empty and shaken,But with a mouth full of tri#ing phrases.Wherefore, then, shall I seek crooked paths,And forsake the open highway?1

What is this dubious ‘Greek wisdom’ which, according to Judah Halevi,should not entice a Jewish ear? It is a teaching of being that knows nobeginning and no end; a teaching of nature, physis, which, unlike creation,beriah, rolls in the eternal return of the same, o"ering no hope and no respitefrom its monotonous rhythm of endless repetition.

According to the classical de!nition of Aristotle, physis is a system of allbeings that fall under the inexorable rule of cyclical alternation between genesiskai phtora, generation and corruption; the tragic rule that knows no exception.This is precisely the gist of the Greek wisdom against which Halevi proteststhe strongest: the tragic sense of life that ‘has no fruit but only blossoms’, andwhere everything that has come into existence can only blossom for a while,for it is doomed from the start to wither, before it can truly begin to be, and

truly mature in being. Only seemingly, therefore, is Greek philosophy focusedon being, on what really exists, ontos on. In fact, as Halevi suggests, it is ascience without foundation, perplexed and confused, where everything solidmelts into air and all being is tinged with nothingness from which it can neverseparate itself properly. For it is only the teaching of creation, and God as thecreator, which can lay a proper foundation for our understanding of whattruly exists. The very concept of being as such, apparently the most cherishedcentre of Greek thought, becomes possible and tenable only within themetaphysics which bases itself on the notion of creation.

In this manner, Halevi, although he writes his poem against all philosophyoriginating in ‘Greek wisdoms’, nonetheless makes a strong philosophicalstatement of his own. Without wanting it, he philosophizes. Despite the overtdeclaration, which refuses to engage with ‘shallow and hollow’ Greek wordsand promises to listen only to the divine words perfumed like a myrrh, thepoet becomes seduced by the power of the philosophical form, if not thecontent, and produces an argument. He does not just listen to the word ofGod, and does not just comment; the form in which he opposes the Greekwisdom of the endless and timeless universe is already contaminated by thisvery wisdom’s mode of reasoning.2

Thus, even the most pious Jew gets dragged, against his will, into philoso-phizing. It will be my argument here that this poem – on the surface !ercelyanti-philosophical, but deep down rather counter-philosophical – can be trea-ted as a paradigm of all intellectual attempts that come under the heading of‘Jewish philosophy’. The mixture of anti-philosophy, which explicitly declareswar against the Greek genre of thinking, and counter-philosophy, whichimplicitly engages in creating counter-arguments, aimed to oppose the Greekvision of the uncreated cosmos, will become a characteristic feature of thisuneasy, deeply troubled thing we call, for the lack of a better name, ‘Jewishphilosophy’, from the Hellenistic times of Philo of Alexandria up to thepostmodern, neo-Alexandrian times of Lévinas and Derrida.

Judah Halevi’s famous treatise The Kuzari, written in 1140, is the bestexample of this paradoxical fusion. Using the story of the dialogue betweenthe pagan King of Khazars and the Jewish Rabbi, who managed to convertthe former to Judaism, Halevi produces a string of beautifully roundedphilosophical arguments in favour of creatio ex nihilo and against the wholeof Greek philosophy, which, as we are told again, should not entice the ear ofa true believer.3 It is not an accident that Halevi is often compared to theIslamic thinker Al-Ghazali and is thought to occupy an analogical positionwithin Judaism; just as Al-Ghazali, the celebrated theologian of the Islamickalam, rallied all the arguments he learned from Aristotle to turn themagainst the Greek sage and thus to defend ‘the God of theologians’ against‘the God of philosophers’, so did Halevi, who used the whole philosophicalarsenal to bring it to self-destruction. But, the question immediately arises,can one borrow the argumentative form of the ‘Greek wisdom’ without takingany of its content? Can this split between form and content be as clear-cut as

2 Introduction

it appears to Al-Ghazali or Halevi? Or, can one ‘marry the speech of stran-gers’, in this case the speech of Greek philosophy, and still maintain all theinnocence and freedom of a single bachelor, monolingual in his faithfulness toJewish religion?

The second poem, where the phrase ‘marrying the speech of strangers’appears, was written by the contemporary Jewish-American poet CharlesRezniko". Rezniko", himself a descendant of East European Jewry, whospoke some Yiddish but not Hebrew, created in the 1960s the poetic cycleJerusalem the Golden, which o"ers a modernized rereading of the Tanakh, theHebrew Bible. Being a poet, moreover an emphatically Jewish poet, butunlike Halevi no longer safely rooted in the knowledge of Hebrew, Rezniko"was acutely aware of the linguistic problem posed by such identi!cation. Thisis why, already in the !rst part of the cycle, Rezniko" gives us his own versionof The Song of Songs where the nuptial celebration between Solomon and theShulamite becomes a symbol of the linguistic marriage between the poet,‘Hebrew by heart’, and the English language, the passive matter of wordsready to be impregnated by the foreign impulse, or an empty form ready to be!lled with a foreign spirit:

Like Solomon,I have married and married the speech of strangers;None are like you, Shulamite.4

The marriage between the Hebrew heart, ardent yet mute, and the EnglishShulamite, the Shakespearian vocabulary of words, which is like no other inits eloquence, is a true marriage; it creates an o"spring which is a ‘third lan-guage’, not to be reduced to the separate identities of its parents. It is pre-cisely the idea of this ‘third language’ that becomes the guiding motif ofRezniko"’s poetry. In the part 77th of Jerusalem the Golden, entitled ‘Joshuaat Shechem’, he writes about the Jews condemned to live in the linguisticdiaspora:

And God scattered them –Through the cities of Medes, beside the waters of Babylon.And God looked and saw the Hebrews,Citizens of the great cities,Talking Hebrew in every language under the sun.5

The situation of ‘Jewish philosophy’ is exactly like the one described byRezniko": it is the singular predicament of the ‘third language’ in whichJewish thinkers talk Hebrew in words, concepts and arguments bequeathed tothem by Greek philosophers.6 Some of them, like Judah Halevi, would stillclaim that they can keep the elements safely separate and always tell theHebrew and Greek wisdom apart, but most of them, in fact, would ratheradmit that the fusion is inseparable, as indeed in a true marriage, and that

Introduction 3

‘talking Hebrew in every language under the sun’ does not leave the Jewishcomponent untransformed.

Philosophical Marranos

We can thus see ‘Jewish philosophy’ as a primarily linguistic problem: speak-ing one language with the help of another, a case of an instantaneous bilin-gualism. This brings us immediately to yet another metaphor coming fromthe Jewish tradition, namely that of Marranos, the Spanish Jews forced toconvert to Christianity, who nonetheless preserved their secret Jewish faith:the Marranic ‘Judaism undercover’, where the unspoken Hebrew shinesthrough but also subverts the overtly spoken dialect of the imposed ‘speech ofstrangers’, in this case the Christian religion. It is not an accident that the !rstJewish thinkers who entered the world of modern Western thought weremostly of Marrano origin: not just the radical followers of Sabbatai Zevi, the17th-century false Messiah, who proclaimed the messianic revolution and,having converted to Islam and Christianity, left Jewish ghettos of Eastern andSouthern Europe to spread the revolutionary news, which eventually led someof them to take active part in the French Revolution – but also such eminentindividuals as Uriel da Costa, Isaac la Peyrère and Baruch Spinoza.7 The lastone of this great philosophical line, Jacques Derrida, openly claimed to be ‘asort of marrane of French Catholic culture’,8 and this declaration promptedhim to articulate this peculiar experience of the ‘third language’, which wewould like to call a ‘philosophical Marranism’ – to denote a type of thinker,like himself, who will never break through the Joycean ‘Jew-Greek, Greek-Jew’confusion, but nonetheless will try to turn it into his advantage. That is, tomarry the speech of strangers and let the Hebrew talk through it: to docounter-philosophy with the help of philosophy.9

There are many ways to approach the phenomenon of ‘Jewish philosophy’,but the way I !nd most convincing focuses precisely on the linguistic aspect ofthis problem. I say ‘problem’, for even the very existence of such a practice as‘Jewish philosophizing’ remains highly problematic, a fact which is so welltesti!ed by Halevi’s rejection of philosophy as ‘the wisdom of the Greeks’.Yet, despite Halevi’s warning, a hybrid entity called ‘Jewish philosophy’nonetheless emerged, giving rise to many doubts and questions concerning itsstatus and legitimacy. These doubts only intensi!ed with the birth of modernitywhen many Jewish thinkers, who still considered themselves Jewish despitethe fact that they had lost their footing in the traditional Jewish culture,entered the Western intellectual world. For the medieval Jewish philosophers,such as Saadia or Moses Maimonides (but also Halevi in his philosophicalphase, while writing The Kuzari), thinking according to Aristotle or Plotinuswas mostly a matter of appropriation, which would leave the essential struc-ture of Jewish thought intact, or at least so they thought. Yet for thesemodern thinkers, so often already acquainted with the Marrano experience,‘philosophizing’ meant a confrontation with a radically foreign linguistic

4 Introduction

medium, which would issue in a wholly new re#ection on the language ofphilosophy; !rst of all, putting in doubt its alleged and self-professed uni-versality. Always accused of particularism, the Jewish thinkers started to turntables and throw the same objection against the Western philosophy thatformulated it in the !rst place.

But they rarely do it openly under Jewish auspices. Franz Rosenzweig bit-terly protested when The Star of Redemption landed as a ‘Jewish book’ on thesame shelf with other pious and educational Bar Mitzvah presents for youngboys.10 He feared that his ambitious e"ort to create neues Denken, ‘newthinking’, would be thwarted the moment it opened itself defencelessly to theobjection of non-universality. Walter Benjamin’s celebrated image of thepuppet and the dwarf, in which the former represents the public philosophicaldiscourse and the latter stands for hidden ‘ugly and wizened’ theology, goeseven deeper in the ‘Marrano’ direction by encoding the strategy of deliberatesecrecy and ruse; once fully revealed, the Jewish theological message wouldlose all its conceptual force.11 Still later, Max Horkheimer, asked during aninterview for German radio about the shortest possible de!nition of theFrankfurt School (in a manner similar to the question famously posed toRabbi Hillel who o"ered the most concise de!nition of Judaism ‘whilestanding on one foot’), answered immediately that it was a ‘Judaism under-cover’.12 But the true master of the secret turns out to be Jacques Derrida inwhom the ‘Marrano tendency’ culminates and at the same time #ips over tothe other side, becoming a secret du Polichinelle, a non-secret secret secretlyknown by everybody where the phrase ‘but don’t tell anyone’ (used byDerrida in Archive Fever) ironically turns into positive, though still indirect,communication.13

Derrida is particularly useful here, mostly because of his openly declaredlinguistic promiscuity. By discarding faithfulness to any monolingual tradi-tion, he stands !rmly on the post-Babelian grounds of the dispersion ofidioms that can approach universality only horizontally: not by assuming atranscendent and superior meta-position, but by engaging in clashes andstormy ‘marriages’. There is no such thing as a homogenous universallanguage. Yet universality can be approached by ‘marrying the speeches ofstrangers’, which completes the broken whole on the horizontal level, withoutusurping the God-like point of view hovering over the clamour of di"erences.As Walter Benjamin says in ‘The Task of the Translator’ (the essay whichserves Derrida as the canvas of his Babel variations), the only possible strat-egy of universalization rests on the awareness of particularity of all languages,which then lend themselves to the practices of translation (Übersetzung)and completion (Ergänzung). The universal can only be made out of thepatchwork of mutually strange idioms that are forced into ‘marriage’ by thetranslator.

Elaborating on the metaphor of Babel, Benjamin argues that, while lan-guages are foreign in their dispersion, they also are not complete strangers toone another because they all hide the memory trace of ‘pure language’, which

Introduction 5

is the true universal language spoken only in the paradise, but no longerallowed in the post-paradisiac and post-Babelian condition of the Fall. Theultimate goal of Benjamin’s musings on the nature of translation is preciselythe exposition of the horizontal idea of pure language:

[ … ] all suprahistorical kinship between languages consists in this: inevery one of them as a whole, one and the same thing is meant. Yet thisone thing is achievable not by any single language but only by the totalityof their intentions supplementing one another: the pure language.14

The Benjaminian pure language, strangely resembling Frege’s idea of truth asone and the same denotation ‘meant’ by all the sentences in all the languages,is indeed synonymous with the Truth of Revelation. Hence, translations onlyassists ‘the growth of languages’ by pushing their hidden meaning towardsbecoming manifest. ‘It is the task of the translator to release in his own lan-guage that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues,’ says Benjamin(ibid., p. 261, emphasis added). And then, by almost stumbling on Rezniko"’smetaphor of ‘marrying the speeches of strangers’, Benjamin approvinglyquotes Pannwitz, a German theoretician of translation: ‘He [the translator]must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language’(ibid., p. 262).

And while Benjamin still remains ambivalent as to the dispersion of lan-guages, unsure whether to treat it as a blessing or a curse, Derrida – pushingstrongly into the ‘Marrano’ direction – interprets ‘the task of the translator’ ina decidedly non-nostalgic manner. In ‘Tours de Babel’, the essay partlydevoted to Benjamin, he declares an impossibility of a ‘universal tongue’15

and praises the Babelian dissemination as the !rst move of deconstruction:

The ‘tower of Babel’ does not merely !gure the irreducible multiplicity oftongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of !nishing, of tota-lizing, of saturating, of completing on the order of edi!cation, architecturalconstruction, system and architechtonics.

(Ibid., p. 104)

Moreover, Derrida goes as far as to claim that Babel is, in fact, one of thedivine names and that ‘the proper name of “confusion” will be his [God’s]mark and his seal’ (ibid., p. 107). The legend of Babel, therefore, tells an alter-native story of God’s revelation where ‘confusion’ turns out to be His propername, perhaps even more real than the one revealed at Sinai.16 To reachuniversality does not mean to escape the confusion in a vertical manner but tostay at its level and work through the di"erences it creates.

This is precisely the paradox of what we will call here a ‘Marrano strategy’.The uneasy and deeply problematic discipline of thought called ‘Jewish phi-losophy’ became gradually so unhappy with its own nomenclature that it

6 Introduction

began to claim universality, a true universality, so far unmatched by any lan-guage declaring to be universal: philosophy or Christianity. These ‘philoso-phical Marranos’, always accused of soiling the universal form of philosophyand its Christian avatar with parochial Hebrew content, eventually turnedthis accusation to their own advantage and formulated their standpoint asfollows: at least we know we are particular and can start from there, whileyou, our accusers, remain mistaken as to your own alleged universality andthus can never know or doubt your presuppositions. In fact, the whole evo-lution of modern Jewish thought can be seen as the shift in regard to the issueof universality. Initially, this issue would arouse an envy and desire to be‘properly’ universal, to imitate philosophers as well as Christians, who, as it isstated very clearly in Spinoza, seem to o"er two distinct ways to achieverational transparency: in knowledge and in morals. Then it would graduallyprovoke a protest against such one-sided claims and, as in Hermann Cohen,would give rise to counter-claims, arguing that ‘the language of prophets’ is,in fact, as universal as ‘the language of philosophers’. And !nally, the issue ofthe universal meta-language would simply dissolve by giving way to the‘horizontal’ view that grants particular biases to all languages, and – as inBenjamin and Derrida – desires only that they should play against each otherin the movement of both mutual deconstruction and completion.

In this manner, the Marrano strategy matures from its beginnings as anegative tactic of envy and resentment to become in the end a positive tacticof the ‘true’ universalization of philosophical discourse, which openly drawsout of the sources of Jewish messianism. We can understand this Jewish-Marrano messianism as an after-Babel project to mend the broken wholefrom within, horizontally, without assuming the lofty and proud position of ageneral meta-language, but through the e"ort of bi- or even multilingualism.Just like many Marranos before, who embraced Christianity more than theywould like to admit, these ‘philosophical Marranos’ would not mind beingaddressed by the famous phrase of Paul, whom they regarded as, in fact, oneof the best representatives of Jewish messianism (simply following hereDeuteronomy and Jeremiah): ‘circumcised by heart’. For only this mute yetardent Hebrew heart, when talking through the languages of strangers, tes-ti!es to the surviving presence of the ‘true Israel’. At the same time, however,their e"ort could not be perceived only in terms of giving in to the Christian‘speech of strangers’. On the contrary, their linguistic messianism is not arepetition of the Paulian gesture of universalization; although it aims at thesame goal, it wants to achieve it di"erently, better, wiser and more truthfullyto the Jewish messianic tradition. The ‘philosophical Marranos’ know thatthe true universalism cannot be founded by declaration – ‘neither Jew, norGreek’ – and then sealed with the acceptance of the philosophical meta-language, as it happened in Christianity. The road to universality does notlead through the puri!cation of ‘neither, nor’ but through the ‘marriages’, thatis, the confusions and conjunctions, of the Joycean ‘Jew-Greek; Greek-Jew.’Not through subtractions, which want to reach the deep naked core of a

Introduction 7

purely universal human nature, but through collisions of di"erences, whichhappen all the time on the surface of linguistic encounters.17

The Jewish clinamen: From indi!erence to concern

In creating a more intriguing version of the problem called ‘Jewish philoso-phy’, I am following Harold Bloom and his theory of clinamen as the !rststage of creative revision of the original, as presented in The Anxiety ofIn"uence and A Map of Misreading. The notion of clinamen, the Latinizedname of Democritean parenklisis, the swerve of atoms producing an accidentof newness in the otherwise determined universe, serves Bloom as a blueprintfor the revisionary e"orts of the poets who struggle with their powerfulprecursors in order to win the trophy of originality. Now, if we apply Bloom’srevisionary scheme for the purposes of Jewish philosophy, we shall see thatthe clinamen with which the modern Jewish thinkers swerve away from thebody of Western thought is not so much a helpless local declension or aparochial lessening of the universal paradigm (producing such limited intel-lectual phenomena as ‘Jewish Romanticism’, ‘Jewish Enlightenment’ or ‘JewishMarxism’) as it is a deliberate act of rivalry. The stake of this competition is,just like in Bloom, validity. The only di"erence between the poets and thethinkers here is that while the former !ght for originality, i.e. a place in thepoetic lineage closer to the foundational origins, the latter !ght for uni-versality by questioning the very rules of universality as set by the dominantidiom.18

So far I have been very skilful in avoiding one distinction that, in the con-text that occupies me here, appears rather unavoidable, alas. It is the clichéd,worn out distinction between Athens and Jerusalem, which came intoexistence thanks to Tertullian, the 2nd-century Church Father who famouslyexclaimed: ‘What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ This wasobviously a rhetorical question, for the answer was already implied: nothing.19

In this manner, Tertullian inaugurated the whole line of Christian thinkerswho have either opposed or found problematic the massive borrowing thatChristian theology has taken from the Greek philosophy, most of all fromPlato and Aristotle. Tertullian was kept in the shadows during the Patristicand Scholastic times, but re-emerged as an important precursor in modernity,inspiring such thinkers as Blaise Pascal, Søren Kierkegaard, Matthew Arnoldand Lev Shestov. It was thus Tertullian who gave impulse to the further ela-boration of the Athens versus Jerusalem motif along the lines of the followingmodern distinctions: the Pascalian di"erence between raison d’esprit et raisondu coeur; the Kierkegaardian contrast between rational logic and the leap offaith; the Arnoldian cultural tension between Greek ‘sweetness and light’ andJewish ‘fanaticism of heart’; and the Shestovian reason against revelation.

I have been avoiding this Tertullianesque lineage mostly because it is a veryChristian version of the events, which Jewish thinkers approach with justi!ed

8 Introduction

misgivings. Not that they do not have their own variant of this opposition;Judah Halevi’s poem gives a good account of the tension between Shem andYaphet, or between Torah and Sophia, the ‘teaching’ and the ‘wisdom’, asseen precisely from the Jewish perspective.20 But what di"ers in these twoapproaches is the criterion. In the line inaugurated by Tertullian, it is alwaysrationality versus irrationality; the mundane logic of Greek philosophersopposed to the scandalous, absurd, and surreal event of God’s cruci!xion. Itascribes reason to the Greeks and revelation – the more irrational, the moreauthentic – to the Jews and, a fortiori, to the Christians. And it is preciselythis particular criterion, turning faith into an emphatically irrational decisionwhich severs rationality from religiosity, that is met by such a strong proteston the Jewish side. As Lévinas says in ‘God and Philosophy’: ‘It is to doubtthat this opposition constitutes an alternative’ (GP, p. 57).

For the Jews have no problem whatsoever with calling Judaism, inHermann Cohen’s words, a ‘religion of reason’, i.e., a religion that de!nedrevelation as the !rst enlightenment, disenchanting the world from the pagancosmic gods. One of the most interesting aspects of ‘Jewish philosophy’, asI want to see it here, is that by mixing and marrying di"erent languages, itcan also subvert and undermine its clichéd distinctions and introduce phrasesthat sound meaningless on the well-trodden monolingual paths of Westernthought, as precisely this one: ‘religion of reason’. This formulation is ano"ense to those Christians, who, especially in modernity, usually do not seethemselves on the side of the Enlightenment – and a scandal to the radicalsecularists who wish to purge their thought from the last remnants of theism.Yet it is the most apt de!nition of Judaism ever provided and, at the sametime, the most accurate de!nition of the subject of the so called ‘Jewishphilosophy’, which, at its best, re#ects on this peculiar, alternative rationalitycoming ‘out of the sources of Judaism’, not to be con#ated with the Greeklogos and its cosmic, unrevealed hochmat yevanit.

Let us focus now on two concrete examples: two illustrations of howmodern Jewish thinkers re#ect on their own status as thinkers, or as repre-sentatives of what we call here, very tentatively, ‘Jewish philosophy’. The !rstexample will be o"ered by Leo Strauss. A great specialist in Plato and allthings Greek, he wrote a few essays on Jewish matters, among them‘Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Re#ections’, written in 1967. Manycontemporary American acolytes of Strauss strive nowadays to turn him intoan eminent and dedicated Jewish scholar, yet it seems to me that the onlydi"erence in this essay, which sets Strauss just an inch apart from the tradi-tionally Christian approach to the Athens-Jerusalem question, is the boldreversal of the title: ‘Jerusalem and Athens’. Strauss begins:

All the hopes that we entertain in the midst of the confusions and dan-gers of the present are founded positively or negatively, directly or indir-ectly on the experiences of the past. Of these experiences the broadest anddeepest, as far as we Western men are concerned, are indicated by the

Introduction 9

names of the two cities Jerusalem and Athens. Western man became whathe is and is what he is through the coming together of biblical faithand Greek thought. In order to understand ourselves and illuminate ourtrackless ways into the future, we must understand Jerusalem andAthens.21

So far, so good. But the di"erence itself, which Strauss subsequently elucidates,will sound very disappointing to the Jewish ear:

We must then try to understand the di"erence between biblical wisdomand Greek wisdom. We see at once that each of the two claims to be truewisdom, thus denying to the other its claim to be wisdom in the strict andhighest sense. According to the Bible, the beginning of wisdom is fear ofthe Lord; according to the Greek philosophers, the beginning of wisdomis wonder. We are thus compelled from the very beginning to make achoice, to take a stand. Where then do we stand? We are confronted withthe incompatible claims of Jerusalem and Athens to our allegiance. Weare open to both and willing to listen to each. We ourselves are not wisebut we wish to become wise. We are seekers for wisdom, philosophoi. Bysaying that we wish to hear !rst and to act to decide, we have alreadydecided in favour of Athens against Jerusalem.

(Ibid., pp. 379–380)

On Strauss’ account, even the smallest doubt, indecision, re#ecting vacillation –all these attributes of a questing (Strauss would say zethetic) attitude, alreadybetray our allegiance to the paradigm of philosophical Athens, for Jerusalemrequires nothing less than an absolute obedience, a humble hearkening to theword of revelation (‘Let us never forget that there is no biblical word fordoubt,’ ibid., p. 381). Can there be any common land between these twocities, any form of a double allegiance that could create a ‘Jewish philosophy’?No, says Strauss. There is no such thing; only the strict Kierkegaardian‘either, or.’ But not even this; we are merely deluding ourselves that we standin front of any alternative. Already perceiving this situation as a possibility ofchoice places us inescapably on the side of Athens. Modern men, living in thecondition of questing, given multilingual choices, alternatives, possibilities,are already philosophers. The simple childlike faith of Jerusalem is lost tothem forever.

If we follow Strauss (and many contemporary Jewish scholars unfortunatelydo so), the very concept of ‘Jewish philosophy’ will become an oxymoron, acontradiction in terms; perhaps even the less charged formulation ‘Jewishthought’ will become highly problematic too, because the absence of alter-natives, which Strauss ascribes to Jewish faith in revelation, precludes anypossibility of thinking. No parochial declension is possible here, not to men-tion even more serious competitive clinamen; any ‘marrying’ of these twoidioms is doomed to fail by producing only stillborn hybrids. But those who

10 Introduction

follow Strauss on this point fail to see his Socratic irony; they do not take fullaccount of his diagnosis according to which no one can choose the simple wayof Jerusalem in modern times, even the most devoted believing Jew. Hisapparent defence of Jerusalem as a separate wisdom of harkening to therevealed Word turns out to be the !nal stroke, the last nail to the co$n of thereligious paradigm in modernity. Imagining himself as a ‘Jewish Socrates’,Strauss makes a deliberate conversion to philosophy, all the more determinedprecisely because of his previous religious upbringing, which he knows hemust leave behind. Strauss, whom so many Jewish scholars nowadays hailas the greatest Jewish thinker of the 20th century, practically declares ourdiscipline impossible. What an irony indeed.

Yet there is another contender to the title of the greatest Jewish thinker ofthe 20th century, and this one should be much closer to us, the hopefulrepresentatives of ‘Jewish philosophy’: Franz Rosenzweig, an older colleagueof Leo Strauss, whom he acquainted at the Jewish Free Learning House inFrankfurt. Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption o"ers the best example of the‘third language’, a true child of the stormy marriage between philosophy andreligion. Despite his o$cial ‘return to Judaism’, Rosenzweig does not pretendthat the modern world, in which languages marry one another and choicesabound, can be erased; he is determined to practice precisely what Straussdeems impossible: ‘modern Jewish thought’. But he knows that in order to doso he cannot rely on the classical opposition of Jerusalem and Athens, as itre-emerges – albeit in a strange Jewish-Tertullianesque variation – in the essayof Leo Strauss. In Rosenzweig’s highly innovative approach, the usual vectorof the relation between ‘the Hebrews and the Hellenes’ becomes reversed. It isnot the Greek philosophy that delivers categories to capture the speci!city ofJerusalem by privation or negation (as lacking rationality, freedom of thoughtand wonder), but the other way round: Athens, and the whole philosophicalformation ‘from Ionia to Jena’ is perceived and interrogated from the positionof Rosenzweigian ‘new thinking’, deriving – to use Hermann Cohen’s phraseagain – straight ‘out of the sources of Judaism’.

This dialogue is not so much a philosophical symposium as a religiousencounter. Now it is not the two systems of thought – one free to seekwisdom, the other restrained from the start by the revealed word, that standagainst one another – but rather two forms of religion, two types of faith anddecision, which rely on two di"erent models of obedience. Rosenzweig wantsAthens to defend and prove its own form of religiosity in the face of Jewishrevelation. This ingenious reversal of the perspective constitutes the !rst partof The Star of Redemption, where Rosenzweig, inspired by Nietzsche, exam-ines ‘Greek religiosity’ as the tragic religion of the natural sublime, withwhich no man can argue, and juxtaposes it with the Jewish revelation whicho"ers the possibility of a new, truly revolutionary change in our attitudetowards the deity, conceived now in terms of dialogue, loving exchange andthe partnership of the covenant. Athens, therefore, stands not so much for aquesting freedom of philosophy as for a tragic decision to see life as

Introduction 11

constrained by fate, death, and natural necessity, from which there is noescape. Jerusalem, on the other hand, stands not so much for fanatical obe-dience as for a religious revolution that allows an Exodus from the Egypt ofself-enclosed nature and liberates life from the power of death. It is not thepairing of reason versus unreason that delivers the right criterion of di"erence,but the opposition of two fundamental decisions: life against death, whichalso happens to be the opposition of life against being or, in the last instance,love against indi#erence.

Rosenzweig’s case shows very clearly that apart from its formal character-istics (the ironic reversal of the claim to universality), the Jewish clinamenpossesses a very palpable content value that we can describe, in its originalatomistic terms, as a swerve of concern against the free-fall of indi#erence.From Halevi to Heschel, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Lévinas, and Derrida, therecontinues a ‘crooked path’ of thinking that breaks with the ‘open highway’ ofthe neutrality that constitutes Greek ontos on. In Thorleif Boman’s words, it isa ‘dynamic strain of Hebrew thought’22 that tries to breathe life into the stonycosmos of indi"erence, and with it care, concern, complaint, but also a pos-sibility of a$rmation, of saying an emphatic yes, yes … Thus, even Strauss,who otherwise has no trust in Hebrew thought, conceiving of it as a simpleform of belief, will claim that ‘the Presence of God or His Call elicits a con-duct of His creatures that di"ers strikingly from their ordinary conduct; itenlivens the lifeless, it makes #uid the !xed’.23 This is precisely the pivot onwhich Rosenzweig builds his practice of Neues Denken: a ‘life-centred view’(Lebensanschauung) that privileges the perspective of the living and sees intheir precious and particular life a possibility of a$rmation in which being,shaken out of its indi"erence, can !nally say ‘yes’ to itself. The clinamen,which becomes so visible in Rosenzweig, but can also be applied to the wholemodern Jewish thought, can thus be called messianic; it o"ers itself as aredemptive correction/alternative to the predominantly tragic ‘worldview’(Weltanschauung) which accompanies the philosophical discourse from themoment of its inception.24

This ‘new thinking’ – the function of which is to tell stories, or, to be moreprecise, to tell dynamic and ‘warm’ Hebrew stories within the immobile andindi"erent structure of Greek concepts; to breathe in possibility into necessi-tarian universe – locates itself on the very antipodes to the silence thatsurrounds the ‘religious man’ in Tertullian, Pascal and Kierkegaard. Nothingis further from the Rosenzweigian opening of philosophical language to theliving word of story than the Tertullianesque gesture of rejecting all logos inthe name of the ine"able, blind obedience to revelation. Tertullian’s credo quiaimpossibile, Pascal’s ‘sacri!ce of the intellect’, Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’, orStrauss’ ‘faithfulness to the word’ do not look for another language; havingtransgressed the discourse of philosophy, they fall into silence, where hear-kening obedience replaces all speech. Rosenzweig, however, chooses a radi-cally di"erent approach that produces a surprising reversal of this traditionalmotif of talkative logos and silent faith. When interrogated by the vital

12 Introduction

questions of life, death, and better life, venturing ‘beyond being’ and its staticindi"erence, the idiom of the Hebrews bursts with eloquence, while the lan-guage of the Hellenes turns strangely mute, chocking on the never asked,indeed non-askable, questions.

It is precisely for this reason that Rosenzweig protested so vehemently whensome commentators classi!ed The Star of Redemption as a ‘Jewish book’. Forthe book he had written (mostly in the trenches of the First World War on theSerbian front) is one of the most universal works that has ever been createdby Western thought; a true guide for the perplexed modern man who lives theBabel-like life, constantly shifting grounds between Athens, Jerusalem, andRome – to name just three cities and three di"erent languages he must learnto speak. Its universality, however, is not that of a transparent meta-language;if there is a Jewish thinker who truly ‘married the speech of strangers’, it wascertainly Rosenzweig who understood Greeks better than they could everunderstand themselves, but also changed the way in which Jews, projectedinto the corner of their imposed particularism, were forced to perceive, orrather misperceive, their vocation. If he achieves the messianic ‘neither Jew,nor Greek’, it is not through the discursive tower of Babel, but through thehorizontal dialogue of languages that all become richer in this confrontation,tending not towards the hostility of mutual contradiction, as in Strauss, buttowards friendship of mutual completion. Franz Rosenzweig ‘marries thespeech of a stranger’, which also means that he manages to turn the strangerinto a neighbour, thus giving Rezniko"’s nuptial metaphor the truly Jewish#avour of ‘neighbourly love’. In Rosenzweig, the Bloomian agon comes itsfull circle: from the initial anxiety of rivalry into a loving reconciliation inwhich the hierarchy between the mighty precursor (Greek thought ‘fromIonia to Jena’) and the aspiring ephebe (new thinking) becomes !nally#attened and all idioms seem to !nd themselves in the same horizontalBabelian !x.25

The Rosenzweigian clinamen, which we detected here as characteristic ofall ‘philosophical Marranos’ of Western modernity – to push thinking‘beyond being’, unmoved and unconcerned, into new areas of transontological,messianic unrest and anxiety – !nds its ultimate formulation in EmmanuelLévinas. His thought, as Robert Gibbs has already shown, is indeed strictlycorrelated with Rosenzweig’s anti/counter/philosophical strategy, which aimsat rede!ning thinking as a category wider than philosophy or, alternatively, atchanging the meaning of the term ‘philosophy’, so it can comprise also dasneue Denken, deriving from the biblical imagination.26 Thus ‘God and Philo-sophy’, Lévinas’ late methodological manifesto from 1975, begins by exposingthe parochiality of Greek ontological thought as founded on the arbitrarygesture of being:

This dignity of an ultimate and royal discourse comes to Western philo-sophy by virtue of the rigorous coincidence between the thought in whichphilosophy stands and the reality in which this thought thinks. For

Introduction 13

thought, this coincidence signi!es the following: not to have to thinkbeyond that which belongs to the gesture or movement of being.27

(GP, 55)

Following Rosenzweig, Lévinas wants to venture ‘beyond being’, just like hewants to undermine the seemingly universal discourse of philosophy, whichbased its claim to validity on mirroring reality as it is. For both of them, beingis not a neutral, abstract, all-encompassing category. Rather, it implies anontological choice, which is also a choice of indi"erence; a certain gesture,and as such a bias that calls into question ‘the dignity of the ultimate androyal discourse’ of philosophy originating in Greece. In this manner, byexposing the ontological gesture as such, Lévinas wishes to return to the placeof origination (the Bloomian place of both originality and universality) thatprecedes Heidegger’s seemingly ultimate ‘return to the Greeks,’ zurück zu denGriechen:

The problem that is posed, and which shall be our own, consists in askingourselves whether meaning is equivalent to the esse of being; that is,whether the meaning which, in philosophy, is meaning is not already arestriction of meaning; whether it is not already a derivation or a driftfrom meaning [ … ] This supposition can only be justi!ed by the possi-bility of going back, starting from this allegedly conditioned meaning, toa meaning that would no longer express itself in terms of being, nor interms of beings.

(GP, p. 57, emphasis added)

Here is the culmination of what we can !nally dub as the Marrano herme-neutics of suspicion towards the philosophical idiom, which it aimed toexpose precisely as an idiom: particular, local, itself a product of a self-unawaredecision, a biased gesture, a declension. In his provocative attempt to ‘thinkbeyond being’, Lévinas makes a clinamen which is to correct the initialclinamen of the Greek thought and thus open a space of a true universalitybefore or in-between the decision to follow either the !nite being or the in!-nite life. But he can show this place of origination only due to the faithfulnessto his own bias, his own messianic thrust that, unlike the Greek dispassionateand contemplative mind that mirrors the neutral status quo of what is, !llsitself with anxious attempts to press new meanings out of the masses of beingand move it ‘beyond’, into the promise of ‘more life’.

At the same time, however, Lévinas seems to be caught in the ironicambivalence of the diagnosis he himself wishes to subvert at the very begin-ning of his essay, and which we should quote in its original inverted commas:‘Not to philosophize is still to philosophize.’ It would appear that just likeHalevi, who professed his hatred of all philosophy in immaculately philoso-phical terms, Lévinas, being far more conscious of his uneasy entanglement,does precisely what he wished to undermine. For just like Halevi, who

14 Introduction

attempted to convince the non-Jewish audience about the superiority of hisown faith, Lévinas plays the philosophical game of universality even as hisplay consists in the radical correction of the rules as initially set in ancientGreece. Or, to put things more paradoxically: he still plays the game of uni-versality, even if he shows that the ambition of the universal, ‘ultimate androyal’ language as such is in itself impossible. By denouncing philosophy’sdesire to represent one necessary language of rational mankind, Lévinas doesnot renounce universality altogether; he rather looks for it in the clashes ofidioms, which reveal ‘many’ under the alleged ‘one’, as well as plastic possi-bilities under the rigid necessity. He may not be happy with the Pascalianopposition between God of Believers and God of Philosophers, but he none-theless wants to preserve an alternative; to make #uid what seemed !xed,i.e., sealed within the ontological idiom of being’s self-su$ciency.28

The antinomian spectre

But there is yet another feature of the Marrano strategy, which plays no lesserpart in its subversive games against all seemingly solid and homogeneousphilosophical languages; the antinomian spectre.

It is because of this hovering spectral presence that, throughout this book, Iwant to keep the Marrano metaphor as open as possible in order to preservethe mesmerizing and symbolic force that it exerted on many Jewish thinkersof late modern times and lent justi!cation to their ‘cryptotheological’ e"orts.This metaphor, therefore, is to work in Hans Blumenberg’s sense of the word,that is, as a #exible vivid image that can attract new meanings dependingon the changing historical circumstances. The signi!cant exception here wasobviously Gershom Scholem who not only felt spellbound by the Marranometaphor, but also delved in detail into what he called ‘Marrano theology’.The fascination with which so many 20th-century diasporic Jews approachedthe ‘Marrano theology’ as a living hypothesis is thus clearly indebted toScholem’s not purely historical work devoted to present it as a still actualphenomenon within the Jewish world. Now, thanks to Scholem, we bestowthe Marrano idea with a rich symbolic potential, far surpassing the sorry fateof the Sephardic Jewry who were converted by force to Christianity but kepttheir Jewish identity under cover as a ‘hidden faith’. We link it rather to theSabbatians who, as Scholem has shown, were mostly Marranos. And probablythe most famous of them, Abraham Miguel Cardozo, wrote an entire treatise,Magen Abraham (The Star of Abraham), devoted to the messianic signi!canceof Marranism, in which the seeming vice of secrecy cunningly turns into avirtue of deeper truth. For, says Cardozo, the true faith can only be hidden.

Only what is concealed can be an authentic faith; what becomes positivelyrevealed is nothing but an o$cial religion. Hence the real faith needs to pro-tect its subversive-antinomian character by avoiding open pronouncementand articulation. It was thus mostly due to this Marrano in#uence that

Introduction 15

Sabbatai’s conversion to Islam became almost immediately interpreted as anact of free will, demonstrating that only ‘hidden faith’ can be genuine: inner,unconcerned and unhindered by o$cial norms and religious institutions.Cardozo believed that Marranos are the truly chosen people, ‘the righteousremnant of a true Israel’, destined to save the world and spread the divinemessage through all the nations by subverting their pagan institutions fromwithin. Sabbatai, therefore, not only followed the way of those re#exiveMarranos, but also justi!ed it and showed its deeper spiritual meaning; now,to convert to Christianity or Islam meant to be able to expand the messianicpractice of ‘lifting the sparks’ from the realm of kelipot, the ‘broken vessels’,and to penetrate the darkest regions of the created world (such as the Islam,at that time no longer so hospitable to the Jews or Roman-Catholic Edom). Tochoose faith in a hidden way meant a deliberate e"ort to keep the antinomianimpulse opposed to all oppressive laws of this world, both secular and reli-gious, from contamination with a fallen reality; to maintain it in a form of ahovering spectre, distanced from any direct positive realization.29

In presenting what may seem to be a purely historical interest in Marranotheology, Scholem comes to the fore as a thinker whose ambitions far surpassthe merely historical. In his characteristically titled ‘Ten Non-Historical Theseson Kabbalah’ (emphasis added), Scholem, who no longer wishes to pass for aneutral historian of the Jewish world, says in deceptively simple words:

The kabbalist claims that there is a tradition (Tradition) of truth whichcan be handed over (tradierbar). This is a very ironic claim since thetruth, of which it speaks, is anything but capable of being handed over(tradierbar). The truth can become known but not passed on, for pre-cisely in what can be passed on, the truth is no longer. The authentictradition remains hidden; the falling tradition stumbles upon an objectand shows its greatness only in the fact that it falls.30

In his wonderful essay on Scholem, Harold Bloom – following Scholem’s owndesire to become !nally ‘unhistorical’ – lovingly ‘exposes’ him as a secretfollower of Abraham Miguel Cardozo, only barely masquerading as adisinterested scholar of Jewish history:

Gershom Scholem, masking truly as a historical scholar, was the hiddentheologian of Jewish Gnosis for our time [ … ] Rarely unmasking, Scholemsometimes hinted his truest desires. One of these hints is his sequenceof ‘Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah,’ !rst printed in 1938:Authentic tradition remains hidden.31

Although Bloom, as he himself avows, is ‘delighted’ by this ‘sublimelyoutrageous’ thesis (ibid., p. 59), he also immediately spots the paradox thatattaches itself to any Marrano declaration of a similar kind. For, ‘if authentictradition must remain hidden, then not only institutional Judaism becomes

16 Introduction

inauthentic’ (ibid., p. 56), this predicament must befall ‘Scholem’s own speechand writing’ too. Yet this paradox is not the end of the story, for it merelycalls us to read Scholem ‘in between the lines’ – to brush his texts against thegrain and pull out from them all the ‘secrets’ they protect better than any‘uncharacteristic silence could have done’ (ibid.). We shall soon see thatScholem’s silence was indeed anything but ‘uncharacteristic’: for him, it wasan equivalent of the via negativa through which every tradition must pass inorder to renew itself. More than that, it was also a point of break or crisisapproaching destruction and oblivion – a ‘!ne line between religion andnihilism’32 – in which the Marrano experience could dialectically turn to anadvantage. Himself a ‘product of the purgatory of assimilation and secular-ization’,33 Scholem, via his highly characteristic ‘Hebrew silence’, attemptedthe experiment of reset and renewal: the near-death experience of the dis-appearing tradition from which it would rise once again, strengthened andinvigorated.34

Yet, as I have already indicated, the true contemporary champion of theMarrano strategy, cunningly playing with the ‘revealment and concealment’of the secret antinomian spectre, is Jacques Derrida. Unlike Lévinas – ‘thelast true Jew’ in theory, a philosophical Marrano in practice – Derridaperforms his tricky Marrano identi!cation in full. He performs it, but, being a‘true’ Marrano (which, as Bloom rightly observes, is a paradox in itself), henever – or very rarely – talks about it openly. There are but few instances inhis work where he alludes to his ‘secret’. In Archive Fever, Derrida playfullydivulges his Marrano sympathies, while referring to Yerushalmi’s essay onthe photographs of ‘last Marranos’ in Portugal made by Frederic Brenner.While watching the portraits of the Portuguese Marranos, Yerushalmi asks:‘But are they really the last?’ and this question receives a kind of oblique replyfrom Derrida: no, they are not; this secret tradition will continue. And notonly does he assert that he has ‘always secretly identi!ed’ with the Marranoheritage (immediately adding in the joking parenthesis: ‘but don’t tell anyone’),but also drags into this heritage of Jewish secrecy the father of psychoanalysishimself by saying that ‘this crypto-Judaic history greatly resembles that ofpsychoanalysis after all’.35 Then, on the next few pages, Derrida gives us abrief prolegomena to any future Marrano strategy, which he identi!es withmessianicity, ‘radically distinguished from all messianism’ (ibid., p. 72): auniversal form of Jewishness which, in distinction to the ‘terminable Judaism’of the rabbinic formation, remains interminable, inextinguishable, indestructible,eternal:

It can survive Judaism. It can survive it as a heritage, which is to say, in asense, not without archive, even if this archive should remain withoutsubstrate and without actuality [ … ] This is what would be proper to the‘Jew’ and to him alone: not only hope, not only a ‘hope for the future’,but ‘the anticipation of a speci!c hope for the future’.36

(Ibid., p. 72)

Introduction 17

This is what ‘constitutes Jewishness beyond all Judaism’: ‘To be open towardthe future would be to be Jewish, and vice versa [ … ] In the future, remem-ber to remember the future’ (ibid., pp. 74, 76). And although Derrida quotesYerushalmi’s de!nitions of the ‘Judaism interminable’ not without an irony,he nonetheless con!rms that what counts in this whole enormous archive,accumulated obsessively by the Jewish archons of memory, is the uniqueindex of its imperative to remember: it is not past-oriented towards the actsof grounding and legitimating a supposedly distinct ‘Jewish identity’ (forwhich he gently reproaches Yerushalmi), but future-oriented, proleptic andunprecedentedly open – a futurité.37

This messianic index, although maintained only by the archive of tradition,is thus also something that destroys the archive in its function of preservingand guarding the nation’s particularity. So, if Yerushalmi says: ‘Only in Israeland nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperativeof an entire people,’38 Derrida will immediately twist this identi!catorysentence with its pathos of distinction into a messianic formula of a promiseduniversalization which, in the future, will abolish ‘the alternative between thefuture and the past, or between “hope” and “hopelessness”, the Jew and thenon-Jew, the future and repetition’ (ibid., p. 79). The messianic futurity cannotbut be universal and thus an-archive/an-archic; even if it grows within a par-ticular archive-tradition, it cannot but aim at the transcendence of this parti-cularity. To turn the archive into ashes is thus the secret vocation of this veryarchive, just as, according to the Sabbatian-Marrano wisdom, the ful!lmentof the Torah was nothing but the !nal destruction of the Torah: ‘The secret isthe very ash of the archive’ (ibid., p. 100).39

The hyper-formulaic power of zakhor, the incantation of the phrase thatimpresses with the force of ‘the strong light of the canonical’ emerges again inDerrida’s later essay ‘Abraham, the Other’. And once again it associatesitself immediately with the motif of secrecy. Following the theme of the‘Freudian impression’, the Niederschrift of the unconscious which keeps itsinscriptions intact in their materiality but also beyond signi!cation, Derridatalks about zakhor in terms of a deeply hidden code, heavy and material withthe weight of a sheer impression, Eindruck. As such it comes closer to whathe calls the bodily archive of circumcision; a kind of an inner circumcision – a‘circumcised heart’ – yet without the Paulian connotations of pure spirituality;it remains material, despite the fact of being secret and inward:

Hence this law that comes upon me, a law that, appearing antinomian,dictated to me, in a precocious and obscure fashion, in a kind of lightwhose rays are unbending, the hyper-formalized formula of a destinydevoted to the secret – and that is why I play seriously, more and more,with the !gure of the marrano: the less you show yourself as jewish, themore and better jew you will be. The more radically you break withthe certain dogmatism of the place or of the bond, the more you will befaithful to the hyperbolic, excessive demand, to the hubris, perhaps, of a

18 Introduction

universal and disproportionate responsibility towards the singularity ofevery other.40

This hyper-ethical, hyper-political, hyper-philosophical responsibility ‘burnsat the most irredentist core of what calls itself “jew”’ (ibid.). Secret, spectral,remnant-like; refusing to be captured in any philosophical idiom ‘belongingto being’; antinomian in its injunction to break every law and attend to sin-gularity only; universal in its e"ervescent inde!nability – this ‘core of whatcalls itself a “jew”’ will burn ‘interminably’ until, according to the meaning of‘irredentism’, it recovers what had been lost: the sense of a messianic justice,buried under so many archives and so many overt identi!cations of the o$cial‘Abrahamic religions’.41

In ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Derrida, again secretly assuming the elusiveMarrano in-between, will thus describe his messianicity as deliberately non-identi!able: ‘This messianic dimension does not depend on any messianism. Itdoes not follow any determinate revelation. It does not belong properly to anyAbrahamic religion’42 – while belonging to all of them at the same time.Strangely echoing the esoteric teaching of the lost ring as we know it fromLessing’s Nathan the Wise, Derrida’s messianicity also comes about as acommon, yet invisible, spectral part, simultaneously belonging to and exclu-ded from the Abrahamic religions. We shall often return here to the spectraldimension of the messianic Spirit – the last Marrano incarnation of theHebrew ruach, passing through many historical disguises as pneuma, Spiritus,Geist, and !nally the Derridean le spectre – so, for the moment, I suspend theprolonged discussion on the proper identity of Derrida’s messianic ghost.43

Su$ce it to say that Derrida is very much concerned in preserving the anti-nomian features of the spectre, which he strongly contrasts with anythingutopian. In a polemic with Fredric Jameson apropos his book on Marx,Derrida says:

Nothing would seem to be at a further remove from Utopia or Utopian-ism, even in its ‘subterranean’ form, than the messianicity and spectralitywhich are at the heart of Specters of Marx [.] Messianicity (which I regardas a universal structure of experience, and which cannot be reduced toreligious messianism of any stripe) is anything but Utopian: it refers, inevery here-now, to the coming of an eminently real, concrete event, thatis, to the most irreducible heterogenous otherness. Nothing is more ‘rea-listic’ or ‘immediate’ than this messianic apprehension, straining forwardtoward the event of him who/that which is coming. I say ‘apprehension,’because this experience, strained forward toward the event, is at thesame time a waiting without expectation an active preparation, anticipa-tion against the backdrop of a horizon, but also exposure withouthorizon, and therefore and irreducible amalgam of desire and anguish,a$rmation and fear, promise and threat [ … ] Anything but Utopian,messianicity mandates that we interrupt the ordinary course of things,

Introduction 19

time and history here-now; it is inseparable from an a$rmation of other-ness and justice.44

Anything but utopian, where utopia may suggest a certain domestication ofour messianic hopes and levelling them to the sober demands of reality prin-ciple (which has always been the practice of philosophy),45 the messianicapprehension contains the antinomian moment in which promise and threat,desire and anxiety, cannot become disentangled. ‘Apocalypse’ rightly has twomeanings that both preserve the antinomian ambivalence: revelation anddestruction – or, putting things more mildly, more in the Derridean vein:a$rmative disclosure and violent interruption. The otherness and justicecannot be separated either, for justice is precisely what is not: as iustitia aliena,wholly alien from being, it does not (yet) belong to the laws of this world.

The science of anti-being

We will !nd a similar intuition in many of the twentieth-century philoso-phizing Jews – Scholem, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Bloch, Taubes, Lévinas – who,despite all the di"erences between them, attempt to maintain the antinomianspark and associate it with the most precious ideatic core of Jewish revelation.The clinamen from ontology and its central concept of being, which we havedetected in their Marrano strategy of writing with and simultaneously againstthe philosophical idiom, reaches its culmination in the counter-science of anti-ontology; a !rm conviction that being cannot be left to its own devices andthat the false calm of the Parmenidean tautology – being is, nothingness isnot – must be disturbed by the antinomian message coming from somewhereelse. This ‘somewhere else’ is an admittedly tricky notion, easily dismissed bythe philosophical ‘science of what is’ (Adorno), yet the whole e"ort of ourphilosophical Marranos goes precisely in the direction of the paradoxicalsecuring its original insecurity; in making it operative within the mechanismsof being.46

The recent vogue in Jewish thought is not very favourable towards theantinomian idea. The works of Paul Mendes-Flohr, Anson Rabinbach, PeterElli Gordon, Benjamin Lazier, Michael Fagenblat, Robert Gibbs, Eric Jacobson,Moshe Idel or Martin Kavka – to name just a few magni!cent authors inthis !eld – tend to downplay it or marginalize it as a momentary surge ofrevolutionary apocalypticism, which they attribute to the historically speci!csituation of the interwar generation of German Jewry, disappointed with theirpredecessors’ haskalic belief in reason and progress and opting for a moreviolent and decisive break in the continuum of Western history.47 My bookgoes very much against this assumption; contrary to their socio-reductivetheses I remain convinced that the antinomian emphasis of the last generationof philosophical Marranos (from Scholem, via Lévinas, to Derrida) is theabsolute intellectual peak in the evolution of Jewish thought. After centuries

20 Introduction

of not always successful tarrying with the power of the philosophical, theseJewish thinkers !nally come to a formula that puts them !rmly on the map ofuniversal speculation: revelation is a science of anti-being. This formula revo-lutionizes the di"erence between Athens and Jerusalem, which once againemerges with a new ideatic force; far from being, as Martin Kavka has put itrecently, ‘our pet mosquito sucking our lifeblood’,48 this opposition not onlydoes not weaken the contemporary speculative thought, but supplies it with anew vigour.

Kavka’s attempt to level Athens and Jerusalem on the basis of theircommon meontology, i.e., the ‘science of non-being’, which eventually developsinto negative theology, is particularly adversarial to my intentions. Kavka’sinstinct is to go for a universal – or, to put it more precisely, universallymessianic – notion of nothing, which appears on both sides of the culturaldivide, and bestow it with a common sense of potentiality, disenclosure, andopen development. In both traditions, being, surrounded and pervaded bynothing, opens itself to a becoming in the positive sense of the word ashistorical self-perfection; on the grounds of such messianically reinterpretedmeontology, Plato, Hegel and Lévinas can !nally shake hands. It is a boldenterprise, in which Kavka, following Lévinas’ appropriation of Plato, activelymessianizes philosophical tradition, yet, just as it was the case of his predecessor,this venture must soon meet its limits. For in these two traditions, the ‘meon-tological conundrum’, as he himself calls it, takes on rather incompatibleforms.

Using Kavka’s terms, we could say that there is a speci!cally Jewish clina-men on the theme of Greek meontology, which turns the latter’s neutralnon-being into an active anti-being and as such parallels the Jewish ‘concerned’swerve on the Greek theme of the eternal indi"erence of ontos on. Contraryto Kavka’s conviction, I tend to believe that there are two very di"erent pathsleading to the discovery of the most general, all-encompassing categories thatmedieval thought called transcendentalia: the philosophical and the revela-tory. While the pinnacle of early Greek thought is constituted by Parmenides’seemingly tautological being is, non-being is not, the very pinnacle of therevelatory thought is achieved with the antinomian intuition of the divine anti-being, which precisely because of this opposition is called ‘divine’. While theformer is reached via contemplative neutrality, the latter is captured in ana"ective pathos that rebels against the submission to the rules of existence;while the former derives its nothing out of reasoning on the conditions ofbeing, the latter forms its notion of nothing out of the emotional distancetowards everything that exists and its inherent ontological laws, verging, as inLévinas’ almost Manichaean case, on horror and disgust. And while theformer looks for the transcendental possibilities of being in the conditioningrealm of ‘beyond-being’, the latter looks for the ethical alternative to the dis-contents of existence given as it is. Once again, it is Lévinas who formulates theessentially antinomian, ethico-subversive nature of the revealed transcendencein the most precise terms:

Introduction 21

God is not simply the ‘!rst other,’ or ‘the other par excellence,’ or the‘absolutely other,’ but other than the other, other otherwise, and otherwith an alterity prior to the alterity of the other, prior to the ethicalobligation to the other and di"erent from every neighbour, transcendentto the point of absence, to the point of his absolute confusion with theagitation of there is [il ya] [ … ] In order that the formula ‘transcendenceto the point of absence,’ not signify the simple explication of an excep-tional word, it was necessary to restore this word to the meaning of everyethical intrigue, to the divine comedy without which this word could nothave arisen.49

(GP, p. 69)

Greek meontology will always lack this antinomian dimension. Non-being, asin Heidegger’s variation on ‘the early Greek thought’, will be rather imaginedas a cradle of beings, the abyss of Seyn from which all particular phenomenaemerge only in order to return to it. We encounter the same idea in theNeoplatonic notion of the divine superessentia: the otherwise-than-being orhyper-being which is nonetheless an a$rmative more-than-being, a nourishingsource of everything that is. The Hebrew anti-ontology, on the other hand,will always imagine God as a nihilizing counter-principle to the world, whichthreatens and traumatizes the creaturely being to its very core. ‘Apocalypse’,let’s repeat it again, rightly has two meanings: revelation and destruction.What it reveals is not a maternal cosmic womb of superessentia that holdsbeing in its nourishing pleroma, but a radical otherness that views the enter-prise of being with accusatory suspicion, undermining its seemingly self-evident right to be. The antinomian feeling that engenders this alternativeperspective is originally and inescapably ethical: as Benjamin says, it is avague, yet determined, presentiment that man is better than his gods whoare the law-giving gods of this world; a hunch that eventually leads to theanticipation of an unknown distant God who is yet too good to be.50

But the greatest speculative challenge of this anti-ontology is to make itwork. The antinomian #ame, guarded by the otherness of revelation, caneither remain absolutely transcendent to the world or can destroy the world,but it is hard to conceive how it can be made operative within the world: tobe present, active and capable of transforming being from the inside. Again,no one understood the risky dialectics of the messianic-antinomian messagebetter than Scholem:

Nothing seems simpler that the messianic idea – the vision of redemptionand liberation – which the prophets of Israel revealed to the people ofIsrael, all creatures in His image and the whole cosmos in general. How‘simple’ seems the sublime truth of this message – and how complex,controversial, even tragic, it turns out to be as soon as it enters the worldand begins its work! Suddenly, the abysses opened themselves in the idea,

22 Introduction

in the very moment there appeared the !rst attempt to exhaust its meaningand ground it in reality.51

All philosophical Marranos wrestle with this abyssal problem, trying to !nd aspace for the antinomian works in between Barthian diathesis and Hegeliandialectics. Karl Barth and Hegel are more than just their historical inspira-tions; philosophically speaking, they indeed constitute two opposite poles ofthe antinomian speculation. While Barth formulates an extreme, almost‘Marcionite’, version of the diathetical opposition between God and worldthat makes it passive and static, Hegel incorporates the antinomian impulseinto the immanent history of being to such an extent that it loses its critical‘power of the negative’. The twentieth-century philosophical Marranos moveon the scale between diathesis and dialectics, emerging as, alternatively,Jewish Barthians (early Benjamin, Lévinas52) or Jewish Hegelians (Rosenzweig,Adorno, Fackenheim), but most of the time as a troubled mixture of both(later Benjamin, Bloch, Taubes, Derrida). Convinced that the antinomianmessage constitutes the very essence of their ‘hidden faith’, the philosophicalMarranos protect it from disappearing from the face of modernity alwaysendangered by, in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s words, falling back into theimmanentist ‘myth of what is’. They want to guard it, but they also want it towork. And this double bind – a very Derridean predicament indeed – determinestheir various paths; though rarely victorious in formulating solutions, they arealways challenging in their e"orts to pose one of the most important – if notthe most important tout court – philosophical problem of our times.

Synopsis

As all contestants in the Bloomian revisionary agon, those modern philoso-phical Marranos wish to go back to the very source, reset the conditions ofthe game, and play it again, only this time play it better. By marrying thespeeches of strangers, turning them to their own advantage, and then learninghow to ‘talk Hebrew in every language under the sun’, they do not just expresstheir ‘hidden faith’, which couldn’t have found more direct articulation, theyrenew and renegotiate the conditions of modern Western thinking – by chan-ging it not just on the margins, but at the very centre, at its core and origin.Nor should it be thought that they leave only enigmatic traces of their exoticformation on the neutral corpus of thought. By challenging the very notion ofcontemplative neutrality and indi"erence, and pressing for their own all-moving, dynamic, anxious and restless life-centred – or singularity-centred –view, always based on choices and decisions, they challenge the very idea ofan abstract universality. Having always been accused of parochiality and thusacutely conscious of their own idiom, they !nally turn their own idiomacityinto a virtue and project it onto other languages, which in the end are exposedas nothing else but simply ‘speeches of strangers’, equally other, mixed and

Introduction 23

idiomatic. Pace the ideological conviction of philosophy that it represents theunmoved being under the auspices of the Unmoved Mover, this ultimate Godof Philosophers, the philosophical Marranos see all thought as ultimatelyspringing from fundamental moves and gestures, which then leave an indeliblybiased idiomatic trace on every discourse, be it ontological or transontological,tragic or messianic. The universality they envisage is not the one of the con-templative paralysis that would still all that moves; rather, it is the one thatresides in letting these myriad moves and gestures come to the fore, no longerpretending to hide behind the seemingly presuppositionless and unconditionedthought.

This book is going to explore the intricacies of the ‘Marrano’ revisionaryagon in modern philosophy. Yet it is not a book in the history of ideas, ratherit is a speculative intervention, the aim of which is to cut into the very middleof actual philosophical debates. The Jewish clinamen, due to which modernJewish philosophy uses and abuses the fundamental categories of Westernthought, is predominantly cryptotheological. But I do not use here the word‘theology’ in a sense which !gures in Lévinas’ ‘God and Philosophy’, i.e. as abeing-biased science of God, whose history is the same as ‘the history of thedestruction of the transcendence’ (GP, p. 56). I use it in a much more neutralway, which can also embrace the special slant of Jewish religious thinking,which I have already named as the swerve from the free-fall of indi"erencetowards concern and anxiety, refashioning the world in dynamic terms ofontological insu$ciency and the need for redemption. The pre!x ‘crypto’re#ects here the Marrano stance of our thinkers in question, who rarely dis-close fully their Judaic sources of inspiration and if so, then usually for thenon-religious purposes aiming at the renewal of Western modes of thinking.The following chapters will demonstrate how the Jewish clinamen works inspeci!c !elds; how it slants the major concept of Western tradition: tragedy,negative theology, the sublime, messianism, vitalism, Enlightenment, disen-chantment, atheism, reason, negativity, nominalism, dialectics and – last butnot least – post-secular thought. All these guiding themes of Western culture,once submitted to the cryptotheological misreadings of philosophical Marranos,emerge out of their agons thoroughly transformed. Bestowed with whatLévinas calls ‘new meaning’, deriving from the wider, fresher, original, stillunrestricted place of sense-giving, they begin to tell an alternative story ofmodernitas. A story still vibrant with an unful!lled promise, still ongoing, stillhopeful – truly an ‘un!nished project of modernity.’

The three chapters that comprise Part I, ‘Myth, tragedy, revelation’, form aquite separate and not at all minor revisionary agon that we could also title as‘Jewish (mis)readings of Greek tragedy’. It starts with Chapter 1 and HermannCohen, who !rst introduced the conceptual triad – the mythic, the tragicand the messianic – which concentrates on the middle term, Greek tragedyas an intermediary category, poised between the pagan universe of the all-encompassing Oneness and the messianic universe of an individuated multi-tude. Cohen, who opposes prophets and philosophers with ease, nonetheless

24 Introduction

has a problem with the idea of tragedy which escapes the neat antagonism ofHebrews and Hellenes, for tragedy also tells the story of individuation,although merely in negative and in vain. Cohen focuses on the notion of thetragic sacri!ce and then radically transforms it in his reading of Ezekiel,where it becomes an ‘inner sacri!ce’, aiming at the puri!cation of sins and anindividuated working through of one’s yetzer (desire). This triad – the mythic,the tragic and the messianic – o"ering a new schematization of Westernthought, will then prove absolutely crucial for Cohen’s direct descendants,Rosenzweig and Benjamin. Additionally armed with their strong reading ofGyorgy Lukàcs’ ‘Metaphysics of Tragedy’, they take their Jewish agon withGreek tragedy to new speculative heights, where it becomes a decoy for afundamental revision of the whole modern philosophical paradigm, whichthey perceive as insolubly mixed with the ‘tragic worldview’: to them, Benjaminespecially, the whole span of thought ‘from Ionia to Jena’ is thus coextensivewith the transformations of the tragic ‘from Aeschylus to German Trauerspiel’.

Chapter 2, ‘“Job-like questions”: The place of negativity in Rosenzweig’,continues the reading of Rosenzweig from the introduction, by focusing on hismisprision of the tragic hero as standing on the threshold of revelation. As inCohen, tragedy appears here as a transition between the mythic and thereligious world and marks the moment in which the self is born: alreadyindividuated, yet still non-dialogic, ‘mute as a marble’. At the same time Iattempt a critical reading of Rosenzweig whom I reproach for neglecting the!gure of Job, most of all Job the rebel, who – logically speaking – should bepresent in The Star as the true ‘dialogic hero’, and as such the Hebrewcounterpart for Oedipus. I argue that without taking into account Job’snegativity – his complaint against God and the world he created – there canbe no true and convincing passage from the mythic to the messianic, which isprecisely the subject of The Star.

Chapter 3, ‘The revolution of trauma: Walter Benjamin and the TragicGnosis’, closely follows Benjamin’s interpretation of ancient tragedy from hisTrauerspiel book. Tragedy, to which he gives his own peculiar spin, or hisown cryptotheological clinamen, emerges out of his reading as a TragicGnosis: a vague premonition of the messianic, all the more valuable preciselyfor its being secret and inarticulate. I argue that in his gnosticizing misreadingof the tragic hero, Benjamin projects most of his peculiar ‘Marrano metho-dology’: the hidden faith in the hidden God, which remains ‘true’ as long as itstays concealed, silent or (as Derrida would have it later) ‘spectral’, and assuch immune to the contamination by the mythic powers of being. In Benjamin’selaboration, the tragic hero – a magnet of fascinated attraction to the philo-sophical German Jewry of the 1920s and 1930s – turns into an honorary !rstMarrano avant la lettre, hiding the messianic message even before it becamemanifest.

Part II, ‘The antinomian spectre’, opens with Chapter 4, ‘The antinomiansymptom’, devoted mostly to Lévinas, in which I dwell precisely on the issueof Jewish negative theology manifesting itself in active antinomianism: the

Introduction 25

eternal ‘somewhere else’ of radical transcendence which cannot reveal itself inbeing directly, only leaving an aporetic and subversive trace. This aporiaappeared already in the chapter on Benjamin and tragedy, but in the case ofLévinas it becomes particularly acute, forming a kind of an unresolved syn-drome. I argue that Lévinas’ more or less conscious failure to integrate theidiom of revelation and the idiom of philosophy is projected by him on thelevel of theory itself and thus distorts the idea of radical transcendence, whichconsequently becomes too synonymous with the traumatic, all-shatteringencounter with the Other. Though otherwise quite sympathetic to the asso-ciation of revelation with ‘traumatic break’, I argue that Lévinas pushes thetraumatic aspect of the Divine Other too far, leaving us (and himself) in thecondition of an unworked-through symptom. By juxtaposing Lévinas withRosenzweig, I attempt to show that the latter is much more aware of thenecessary clash of idioms and protects his thought from projecting this antag-onism on the level of content. While Lévinas’ narrative of the trace bouncesback and forth between the two non-dialectical extremes of immanent atheismand self-prostrating mysticism, Rosenzweig builds a dialectical story of amessianic vocation that can be inscribed into what Scholem calls a typicallymodern Jewish theological position, the ‘pious atheism’.

The issue of the antinomian messianism returns in Chapter 5, ‘The identityof the spirit: Taubes between apocalyptics and historiosophy’, in which I tryto reconstruct Jacob Taubes’ consciously anti-Hegelian and anti-Heideggerianinterpretation of the ruach as a subversive and elusive energy that cannot becaptured by the pagan opposition of Eros and Thanatos. At the same time,Taubes’ struggles to save the speci!city of the Hebrew Spirit, making himconstantly oscillate between Karl Barth’s diathesis and Hegel’s dialectics, o"erthe best illustration of the di$culty that gets in the way of any thinker con-cerned about the workability of the antinomian impulse. The identity of theSpirit waltzes through its historical manifestations – Biblical ruach, Gnosticpneuma, Trinitarian Spiritus, Hegelian Geist and Derridean spectre – nevercapable of resting in any single one of them.

Chapter 6, ‘The !re and the lightning rod: Tarrying with the apocalypse’,takes on once again the problem of Jewish antinomianism, which it dividesinto two streams: the ‘hot’ or ‘impatient’ messianism of the openly apocalypticthinkers (Benjamin, Taubes, Bloch) and the ‘wary’ messianism of the thinkerswho tarry with the apocalypse and try to bring the !re of the revelatory lovedown to earth, turning it into ‘works of law’ (Lévinas and Rosenzweig).Feeling far more sympathetic to the latter position (which I also !nd moreauthentically Jewish), I focus here on the Rosenzweigian dialectics of love andlaw, which, as I argue, derives from Hegel’s famous de!nition of work as a‘delayed destruction’. If apocalypse/revelation is to work within the creaturelycondition, and not simply destroy it, it must be delayed, postponed and partlynegated by the system of ‘lightning rods’, which defend against the divineviolence, yet, at the same time, render it operative here and now in the formof divine legislation. By reverting Scholem’s critique of Rosenzweig, in which

26 Introduction

the former accuses the latter of taming too much the apocalyptic power inJudaism, I try to argue that it is actually Rosenzweig’s greatest theoreticalachievement. His notion of the Jewish law as a defence mechanism and a‘lightning rod’ that partly neutralizes the revelatory !re, is the best and mostconvincing apology of law (and not just Jewish law) known in modernity; itcan only be matched by Moses Mendelssohn’s famous defence of the ‘religionof legislation’ against the monopolistic claims of Christian love in hisJerusalem.

Part III of this book moves into more general !elds while exploring thecharacteristic of Jewish modernity. Chapter 7, ‘The promise of the name:“Jewish nominalism” as the critique of the idealist tradition’, explores themotif of the ‘transformation of speech’ as the most vital operation of the HebrewSpirit. It wishes to demonstrate that the Jewish clinamen in contemporarylinguistic philosophy resides in its unique interest in the name as, in Benjamin’swords, ‘the true call of language’. I propose to call this position a ‘Jewishnominalism’, which, again, di"ers radically from all forms of modern nomin-alism, for it skilfully avoids two extreme standpoints: instrumental conven-tionalism on the one hand, and ‘speech magic’ (Sprachmagie) on the other(which I attribute to late Heidegger, especially from the period of Unterwegszur Sprache). In Jewish nominalism, the name !gures as the seal of the !nitecreaturely condition and the mark of the singularity of the living, which, asAdorno says, ‘cannot be deduced from thought’ but must always remain theultimate horizon of all thinking.

Then, in Chapter 8, ‘Another nihilism: Disenchantment in Jewish perspec-tive’, I deal with the positive uses of ‘disenchantment’ as a religious category.Against the widespread Christian prejudice, according to which modernity isthe nihilistic age of the destruction of the sacred, I argue – following Cohenand Scholem – that modernity can also be perceived as the most ‘religious’ ofall epochs, which has !nally realised the imperative of Entzauberung asdemythologization and purged the material world of the last remnants of themagical immanent sacrum. This chapter attempts, therefore, to o"er a strongJewish rede!nition of modernity, understood as a religious category and inreligious terms, but also a defence of modernity against its religious and irre-ligious critics who accuse it of the nihilistic desacralization of being (fromNietzsche to Deleuze and, strangely enough, Radical Orthodoxy). Needless tosay, for the philosophical Marranos being as such cannot be desacralized, forit can never become sacred in the !rst place. Holiness resides somewhereelse – always somewhere else and ‘otherwise than being’.

And !nally, Chapter 9, ‘Jewish Ulysses: Post-secular meditations on theloss of hope’, in a way a coda to the whole volume takes on the subject ofpost-secular thought which I want to see in an alternative manner to Habermas,!i"ek, Badiou, and Milbank; as a religious correction to modernity, whichdoes not annul its secular self-de!nition but only adds – or rather enhances –the dimension of the messianic promise and hope, which fell into oblivion dueto the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’. In juxtaposing Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s

Introduction 27

Dialectic of Enlightenment and Joyce’s Ulysses, the two works that sport the!gure of ‘Jewish Odysseus’, I attempt to demonstrate the duplicity hidden inthe concept of Enlightenment as, at the same time, the Greek ‘myth ofcoming out of myth’ and the Hebrew Exodus. While Joyce’s reading of mod-ernity plunges it into the unconquerable dominion of myth, Adorno andHorkheimer leave at least a trace of hope, by pointing to its overshadoweddouble: the still ongoing project of Exodus and its still unful!lled messianicpromise. In the end, I regard the ‘post-secular option’ as a choice of idiomcharacteristic of all philosophical Marranos, detectable in all their writingsavant la lettre. In their attempt to infuse modern Western philosophy with‘other meanings’, deriving out of the sources of Judaism, the !rst religion ofrevelation (or, as Cohen claims, simply ‘religion per se’), they had always beenrealising what the post-secularists wish to do now explicitly, often merelyopening the already opened doors. Alternative modernity, alternative ration-ality, alternative materialism, alternative disenchantment, alternative theology,alternative dialectics – all these post-secular motives had long been present inCohen, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Taubes and Adorno. Their in-betweens andthirds, o"ering optional ways out in the seemingly closed conceptual systemwithout exit – between tragedy and messianism, between diathesis and dialectics,between sacred and profane, between religion and enlightenment – have beensupplying contemporary philosophical thought with an urgency and vigourfor a long time already.

The main purpose of the book is to articulate what has always been presentin Western thought merely implicitly, secretly, caught in too many agonisticinterplays of forces – too ‘Marrano’ in a way. It wishes to make this uniquerevisionary agon, played by modern philosophical Marranos, at least partlyexplicit, and by making it overt, to show how it changed the modern thoughtforever – not just on the margins, but by cutting into its very core. The desirefor this uncovering, which this book ventures to realize, was born from asense of frustration that overwhelmed me every time I read one of the manyexcellent and deeply learned studies of Benjamin, Adorno, Bloch, Bloom orLévinas that take no account whatsoever of their indebtedness to a di"erentconceptual heritage and play out their thought only on the familiar groundsof a well-established institution called ‘philosophy’: from Ionia to Jena, andfrom Heidelberg to Paris. This frustration was akin to the deep sense ofestrangement one feels in front of a perfect behaviourist description that givesa full but ultimately senseless account of human actions, because it lacksthese few central categories – will, motivation, a"ect – that breathe subjectivelife into what we do. In the case of philosophical Marranos, the omission ofthe few central categories deriving from the Jewish heritage amounts to asimilar eclipse of meaning; without them their thinking loses structure anddriving force, lacks breath and liveliness.

There is, however, one worry that remains: that by making this strategy soarticulate, we will only spoil the hide-and-seek game of the philosophicalMarranos and their deeply treasured ‘secret’, the Derridean supreme irony

28 Introduction

of whispering ‘but don’t tell anyone’. Yet, considering all the Babel-like con-fusions in which our contemporary thought abounds, we are ready to takethis risk.

Notes1 See Selected Poems of Jehudah Halevi, ed. Heinrich Brody and Nina Salaman,Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1946, pp. 16–17.

2 In his essay on Halevi’s use of philosophical argumentation, Barry S. Kogandemonstratively shows that, despite his reluctance towards it, Halevi knows hisphilosophy very well: ‘The philosophical reader will surely recognize that behindthe explicit reference to conclusive, demonstrative claims lies the well-known clas-si!cation scheme of dialectical, rhetorical, poetic and sophistical premises andarguments.’ Barry S. Kogan, ‘Judah Halevi and His Use of Philosophy in theKuzari’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy, ed. DanielH. Frank and Oliver Leaman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 118.

3 This time the main target of Halevi’s objections against Greek metaphysics is theabsolute indi"erence of the First Cause and the aimlessness of the whole enterpriseof being: ‘With God there is no being pleased and no feeling hatred, because He, mayHe be exalted, is beyond desires and aims [ … ] Likewise, according to the philo-sophers, He is beyond the knowledge of particulars because they change with thetimes, whereas there is no change in God’s knowledge. Therefore, He is not awareof you, let alone of your intentions and actions, nor does He hear your prayers [ … ]Everything goes back to the First Cause, not because of an aim it has, but ratherbecause of an emanation from which a second cause emanated, then a third, andthen a fourth set of causes. These causes and their e"ects are necessarily connectedto one another and have become a part of a continuous chain. Their necessaryconnection is eternal, just as the First Cause is eternal; it has not beginning.’ JudahHalevi, The Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Despised Religion (TheKuzari), trans. B. Kogan and L. Berman, in Oliver Leaman, Daniel H. Frank andCharles Maneking, The Jewish Philosophy Reader, London and New York: Routledge,2000, p. 204. It is exactly on the same, typically Halevian, impulse that AbrahamJoshua Heschel, one millennium later, will distance himself violently from theAristotelian Neoplatonism and call the Jewish God ‘the most moved mover’: ‘Inthe prophets the ine"able became a voice, disclosing that God is not a being that isapart and away from ourselves [ … ] that He is not enigma, but justice, mercy [ … ]He is not the Unknown, He is the Father, the God of Abraham; out of stillness ofendless ages came compassion and guidance.’ Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man IsNot Alone: A Philosophy of Religion, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997,p. 133 (emphasis added).

4 See The Poems of Charles Rezniko#: 1918-1975, ed. C. Rezniko" and S. Cooney,Ja"rey, New Hampshire: Black Sparrow Books, 2005, p. 93.

5 Ibid., p. 113.6 The term ‘third language’, which I am going to explore in greater detail later,derives from Derrida’s interpretation of the letter of Gershom Scholem to FranzRosenzweig of 1926, known under the title Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache (‘Con-fession on the Subject of Our Language’), in which Scholem issues a warningagainst the rapid profanation of the lashon ha-kodesh, the holy language of Hebrew,as the untoward consequence of the creation of the secular ivrit, the everydayspeech of Jews in Israel. Derrida claims that the letter itself is written in a ‘thirdlanguage’, neither German nor Hebrew, neither profane nor sacred, which, pre-cisely because of its indeterminacy, allows a mediation, a middle ground, between

Introduction 29

the two; a passage, as well as a translation: ‘One might let oneself be tempted hereby what I take the risk of calling a hypothesis of the third language. By these wordsI do not mean a foreign language, German, in which will be formulated a warningthat would concern two practices of Hebrew, the sacred and the secular. Theexpression third language would rather name a di"erentiated and di"erentiatingelement, a medium that would not be stricto sensu linguistic, but a middle/milieu ofan experience of language that, being neither sacred nor profane, permits the passagefrom one to the other.’ ‘The Eyes of Language: The Abyss and the Volcano’, inJacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, trans. Gil Anidjar, London and New York:Routledge, 2001, p. 200. On the category of the ‘third language’ as the mediatorbetween the sacred and the profane, theology and philosophy, see also KarenUnderhill, Bruno Schulz and Jewish Modernity, unpublished doctoral dissertation,defended at the University of Chicago (June 2011), available as http://gradworks.umi.com/3460247.pdf.

7 Scholem comments: ‘The crisis [of tradition], which took the form of the phe-nomenon called Spinoza, merely made manifest to the outside world the traumaticimpact of the Sabbatian movement within the Jewish world.’ Gershom Scholem,‘Die Theologie des Sabbatianismus im Lichte Abraham Cardosos’, in Judaica 1,Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963, p. 121.

8 See Jacques Derrida, Circumfession, in Jacques Derrida and Je"rey Bennington,Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 170.

9 On this see mostly Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in which he takeson Joyce’s pun on ‘Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet’ and concludes in themanner which already anticipates the idea of the ‘third language’: ‘Are we Jews?Are we Greeks? We live in the di"erence between the Jew and the Greek, which isperhaps the unity of what is called history.’ In Writing and Di#erence, trans. AlanBass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1978, p. 153. The Marrano position,which I want to expose in this book, is therefore a complex dialectical strategy,mediating between Isaac Deutcher’s famous ‘non-Jewish Jews’ or George Steiner’s‘meta-rabbis’, i.e. Jewish intellectuals striving against their particularistic back-ground in order to achieve a universal validity, and those Jewish thinkers who arefully content to write nothing but, to use Rosenzweig’s chagrined formulation,‘Jewish books’. It comes closest to what Paul Mendes-Flohr in his in#uential book,Divided Passions, calls ‘bi-valence’. Mendes-Flohr explains: ‘I am principallyinterested in Jewish intellectuals for whom Judaism and Jewishness remain a sourceof pride and salient dimension of their lives marking a meaningful spiritual, cul-tural and ethnick a$liation. In contrast with those Jewish intellectuals who !ndthemselves caught ‘between ambivalent borders,’ these intellectuals seek to treadupon a ‘bivalent way’ in which Judaism and ‘the universal’ will enjoy equal valence.’Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience ofModernity, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991, p. 15. The Marranostrategy is indeed bi-valent or bilingual, but harbours an even more ambitiousgoal – to demonstrate an ongoing appeal of Judaic motives and thus to oppose thewidespread ‘supersessionist’ prejudice of Jewish anachronism.

10 See most the preface to the second edition of The Star of Redemption whereRosenzweig complains about the misplaced reception of his book.

11 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Concept of History’, in Illuminations: Essaysand Re"ections, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

12 See Max Horkheimer, ‘Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen [Gespräch mitHelmut Gumnior 1970]’, in Gesammelte Schriften in 19 Bände, Vol. VII: pp. 385–404,Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1985–1996.

13 In emphasizing the role of the Marrano metaphor in the development of modernJewish thought, I am developing the ideas which I !rst formulated, together withAdam Lipszyc, in the introduction to our collection of essays Judaism in

30 Introduction

Contemporary Thought: Traces and In"uence, London: Routledge, 2014. On theissue of Derrida’s ‘Marranism’ see also two contributions from this book: YvonneSherwood, ‘Specters of Abraham’ and Urszula Idziak-Smoczynska, ‘Deconstructionbetween Judaism and Christianity’.

14 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Selected Writings, Vol. I., ed.Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1996–2003, p. 257 (emphasis added).

15 Derrida, Acts of Religion, p. 107.16 This strong (mis)reading of Derrida’s ‘Marrano’ (mis)reading of Benjamin is

o"ered by Adam Lipszyc in his chapter on Derrida in Traces of Judaism in 20thCentury Philosophy (Slad judaizmu w !lozo!i XX wieku), Fundacja im. Mojz.eszaSchorra, Warszawa 2009, to which I am heavily indebted.

17 The most extreme Marrano strategy was applied by Jacob Frank, the Polishapostate Messiah, who thought about himself as an improved incarnation of Jacobthe Patriarch. As a second Jacob, Frank came to ‘wipe away the tears of Esau’ andstage the promised, yet missed, encounter between the patriarch of Israel and thelord of the pagan Edom (in Frank’s understanding, Roman Catholicism in generaland Catholic Poland in particular). This encounter was the crux of the Frankistsecret doctrine concerning the ultimate messianic event, which consisted in con-quering-befriending Edom without losing any of the vitality of Jewish faith(obviously not to be confused with the ‘deadness’ of Rabbinic Judaism, completelydiscarded by Frank as an empty shell). This vitality spoke to Scholem and con-tinues to speak to Polish Jews today, who !nd in Frankism a vivid inspiration intheir intellectual engagement with modern thought. See, for instance, an energeticpronouncement by one of the leading Polish Jewish philosophers of the youngergeneration, Adam Lipszyc, who in his review of Pawe# Maciejko’s Mixed Multitude(the best and most authoritative account of the Frankist movement to date), says:‘Perhaps, it would be possible to demonstrate that Frank and his ‘words’ determinethe crucial point of an alternative Jewish modernity: modernity su"used with aneerie, both ful!lled and unful!lled, messianism; modernity simultaneously faithfuland unfaithful to tradition, which would consist in a complete exodus from theghetto and an equally complete participation in the surrounding un-Jewish world,and yet, at the same time, would remain detached from it. This alternative Jewishmodernity could be viewed as the truly “un!nished project” which outlined themost proper manner of being and continuing to be a Jew [ … ] We, the PolishFrankists, are true to this idea. We are not particularly entranced by the personalfeatures of our master, or by his aggressive reluctance towards the world of mean-ings, which he attempted to replace with his own divinised body (or, to me moreprecise, with his miraculously self-augmenting and self-multiplying phallus), even-tually with the body of his daughter, Eva. Yet, we treat his intervention as thesource of our modern existence and our modern identity. What we !nd constitutive ofour identity today is the Frankist exodus from the name Israel and the entranceinto Edom-Poland; both identical and non-identical with assimilation, di"eringfrom it by an in!nitesimally narrow fold of detachment. Unlike Gershom Scholem,we don’t think that the only result of the Frankist exodus was the shallow world ofthe 19th century reform, which, for him, constituted a negative incentive to opposeit dialectically in the form of the Zionist movement. As the House of Bondage andthe Promised Land are one and the same place, we, the Polish Frankists, do notintend to go anywhere. The Frankist exodus annulled the straightforward geo-graphical dimension of the messianic idea, which depended on the distinct aware-ness of the uprooted people. But it doesn’t mean that we simply decided to growroots and give up on messianism. Our singular condition cuts into the dualism ofnomadic life and rootedness, of messianism ful!lled and unful!lled: we live in thespace and culture of Edom, but we do not accept it in the form in which it appears

Introduction 31

to us. We do not believe in other places, where the Kingdom could emerge; we donot believe in any historical moment, when the Redeemer could come, becauseJacob Frank – without saving us and without even giving us an autonomous areain Podolia – led us out of the space of expectation into the domain of Edom.Secretly committing our messianic gestures, we deform and transform the worldthat surrounds us, for we know that the redeemed world is already right here,merely looking a little bit di"erent. Totally disinherited, deprived of our ownrituals, covered in Esau’s rags, we do not have our own distinct identity. As JacquesDerrida said, we have only one language and this is not our language.’ AdamLipszyc, ‘The Confession of the Multitude (A Red Letter)’, in Literatura na Swiecie,No. 9–10, 2012, pp. 446–447.

18 It would also be tempting to see Harold Bloom himself and his revisionary theoryof poetry as a perfect example of such Jewish intellectual rivalry in modernity,positioning itself on the very opposite of the humble parochial modes of declension.On this see Agata Bielik-Robson, The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction,Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011.

19 See Tertullian, ‘On the Prescription against Heretics’, in The Writings of QuintusSept. Flor. Tertulianus, Vol. II, trans. Peter Holmes, Edinburgh: T & T Clark,1870, p. 246.

20 On the Jewish variant of this opposition see the recent collection of essays: OriettaOmbrosi, ed., Torah e Sophia: Orrizonti e frontiere della !loso!a ebraica, Genova-Milano: Casa Editrice Marietti S.p.A., 2011.

21 Leo Strauss, ‘Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Re#ections’, in JewishPhilosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern JewishThought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green, Albany: SUNY Press, 1997, p. 377.

22 See Thorleif Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek. New York andLondon: W. W. Norton & Company, 1970, p. 27.

23 Strauss, ‘Jerusalem and Athens’, p. 381 (emphasis added).24 In his re#ections on the Book of Job, Ernst Bloch will thus say simply that ‘the

[Jewish] dichotomy is not between good and evil, Ormuz and Ahriman, butbetween indi"erence, so to speak, and love [ … ] Here evil and trouble seem to benot realities willed by Yahweh or by a God opposed to him, but realities in theirown right, which exist and #ourish in and through the distance kept by God. Theyare fate, let loose in complete indi"erence, and indi"erently frustrating man’sconcerns – like the cosmic nature-demon at the end of the Book of Job.’ ErnstBloch, Atheism in Christianity, trans. J. T. Swann, London: Verso, 2009, pp. 104–105.

25 In his great book on Rosenzweig, Peter Eli Gordon describes his intellectual strategy,while writing The Star of Redemption, as a ‘performance of Jewish di"erence’: ‘ForRosenzweig as for a number of other Weimar intellectuals, Jewish philosophicaland national “distinctiveness” was the fruit of imagination, a performance of dif-ference that gained its very identity in borrowing from the German philosophicaltradition; it was not the somehow natural expression of a self-su$cient Jewishidentity and an integral Jewish canon of ideas. Thus a careful investigation ofRosenzweig’s philosophy must leave behind any commitment to the idea that ittruly belongs to an isolable canon of modern Jewish thought. Or rather, it doesbelong to such a canon, but only because it performs this isolation as a philosophicaldoctrine.’ Peter Elli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism andGerman Philosophy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, pp. 120–121. Thisdescription is absolutely correct, yet it is somehow wrong in its overall tone,implying an unfavourable comparison between the assimilated and partly dis-oriented Weimar Jewry and a German philosophical tradition, supposedlywell-entrenched in its identity. Whereas the Marrano strategy, which I want toattribute to Rosenzweig (who once obliquely compared himself in a letter to a friendto those ‘charged of Judaising in Spain a couple of centuries ago’, ibid., p. 104), is

32 Introduction

far bolder in turning this seeming vice into a virtue. Not only does it say yes to theperformance of its own di"erence, but also imposes this performative principle onother traditions, refusing to see them as uniform and self-su$cient, the Germanphilosophical tradition included. Thus Rosenzweig would not only approach theHebrew narrativism via the lenses of Schelling’s erzählende Philosophie, but wouldalso approach Schelling as a late pupil of kabbalah, who introjected its haggadicelement into his own idealist idiom. Any identity and any di"erence must, there-fore, be performed: there are no natural expressions and no isolated canonsanywhere in the post-Babelian world, either Jewish or German.

26 See Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Lévinas, Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1994.

27 Compare also the fragment from Lévinas’ Talmudic readings: ‘It is doubtful that aphilosophical thought has ever come into the world independent of all attitudesor that there ever was a category in the world which came before an attitude’(NTR, 102).

28 To emphasize this ambivalence was precisely the critical point made by Derridawho, in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, accused Lévinas of not taking seriouslyenough the rules of the philosophical game he himself plays. Yet ‘God and Philo-sophy’, published in 1975, already takes into account Derrida’s deconstructivecriticism and makes of this ambivalence a conscious weapon of choice.

29 Scholem writes: ‘For Cardozo the apostasy of the Messiah represented a kind ofhighest justi!cation of the apostasy of the Spanish Marranos in 1391 and 1492.’Gershom Scholem, ‘The Crisis of Tradition in Jewish Messianism’ (MIJ, p. 64). In thefollowing essay, ‘Redemption through Sin’, Scholem shows the link betweenCardozo’s Marrano theology and the later radical development of the Sabbatianmovement in which ‘messianism was transformed into nihilism’: ‘The psychologyof the “radical” Sabbatians was utterly paradoxical and “Marranic.” Essentially itsguiding principle was: Whoever is as he appears to be cannot be a true “believer.”In practice this means the following: The “true faith” cannot be a faith which menpublicly profess. On the contrary, the “true faith” must always be concealed. Infact, it is one’s duty to deny it outwardly, for it is like a seed that has been plantedin the bed of the soul and it cannot grow unless it is !rst covered over. For thisreason every Jew is obliged to become a Marrano’ (MIJ, p. 109).

30 Gershom Scholem, ‘Zehn Unhistorische Sätze über Kabbalah’, in Judaica 3, Studienzur jüdischen Mystik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973, p. 264.

31 Harold Bloom, ‘Scholem: Unhistorical or Jewish Gnosticism’, in The Strong Lightof the Canonical: Kafka, Freud and Scholem as Revisionists of Jewish Culture andThought, New York: The City College Papers, No. 20, 1987, p. 55. Seeing himselfas a grateful heir of Scholem the non-historian, Bloom then continues his praise,which I can only fully endorse: ‘Indeed, for a host of contemporary Jewish intellec-tuals, the Kabbalah of Gershom Scholem is now more normative than normativeJudaism itself. For them, Scholem is far more than a historian, far more than atheologian. He is not less than a prophet, though his prophecy is severely limitedby his evasiveness’ (ibid., 76).

32 Gershom Scholem, ‘Zehn Unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala’, p. 271.33 As Paul Mendes-Flohr characterizes both Scholem and Benjamin in ‘The Spiritual

Quest of the Philologist’, in Gershom Scholem. The Man and His Work, Albany,NY: SUNY Press, 1997, p. 14.

34 Scholem says in his diaries: Wer Hebräisch schweigen kann … , ‘But the one whocould keep silent in Hebrew … ’ (TB2, 164). The whole fragment, from which Itook this quote, evolves round the importance of silence as the only right expres-sion of the Teaching that should guide the Zionist youth: ‘Hebrew must be thesuperlative of the Teaching’s silence. The person able to be silent in Hebrew surelypartakes in the quite life of youth. There is no one among us who can do this. We

Introduction 33

cannot use our existence as an argument precisely because silence, or more accu-rately stillness (die Stille), is the step in which a life can become an argument,’entry from 1 April 1918 (LY, p. 219). Probably the !rst person to notice Scholem’s‘duplicity’ was his favourite pupil Joseph Weiss who in 1947, in an essay com-memorating Scholem’s 50th anniversary, wrote: ‘Scholem’s esoterism is not anabsolute silence, it is an art of a camou#age [ … ] The secret metaphysician paradesin the clothes of a strict scientist. Science is Scholem’s incognito,’ quot. after EllettraStimilli, ‘Der Messianismus als politisches Problem’, in Jacob Taubes, Der Preisdes Messianismus, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006, p. 139. For moreon Scholem’s inclination towards secrecy, see the essay ‘The Revolution of Trauma’,which contains a section on Scholem’s early piece on ‘the unfallen silence’, also inthis volume.

35 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz,Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 70.

36 The internal quotes refer to Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses. JudaismTerminable and Interminable, Yale University Press: New Haven, 1991, p. 95. This‘interminability’ chimes well with Rosenzweig’s notion of ‘eternity,’ which he ascri-bed to a Jew as an ‘eternal remnant’: a revealed, universal, and not yet realisedpotentiality of being, which the Jew carries in himself, even when enmeshed in thevery midst of historical existence. See also Gerard Bensussan’s great interpretationof the remnant motif in Rosenzweig and Derrida, in Judeities.

37 The necessary connection between messianicity, futurity and universality was !rstfully endorsed by Ernst Bloch who (perhaps in less subtle terms than Derrida)criticized the Christian thinkers for the destruction of the radical futurum by theirreliance on the Platonic notion of anamnesis: ‘It is simply that their systems arebound together with Greek thought, which is being-oriented and anti-historical,instead of which the historical thought of the Bible, with its Promise and itsNovum – with the Futurum as an open possibility for the de!nition of being, rightup to the point of Yahweh himself [ … ] Hence too the di"erence between epi-phany and apocalypse, and between the mere anamnesis of truth (remembering,circular line) which stretches from Plato to Hegel, and the eschatology of truth asof something still open within itself, open with Not-yet-being.’ Bloch, Atheism inChristianity, pp. 44–45.

38 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Seattle andLondon: University of Washington Press, 1996, p. 9.

39 This is why I cannot agree with Robert Gibbs who, in his otherwise very cleveressay on messianic epistemology, somewhat #attens Derrida’s subtle reasoning byconcluding that Derrida’s rendering of ‘in the future, remember to remember thefuture’ amounts to a ‘formal claim’ that fully ‘decontextualizes it from the Jewishpeople’. Robert Gibbs, ‘Messianic Epistemology’, in Yvonne Sherwood and KevinHart, eds.,Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, New York and London: Routledge,pp. 123–124. This decontextualization, if it indeed occurs, never completely leavesthe Jewish realm; rather, it is a recontextualization in which Jewish revelationregains a universal appeal, solely on the grounds of what it says, and a such cannotremain limited to ‘Jewish people’ only.

40 Jacques Derrida, ‘Abraham, the Other’, in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida,ed. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B.Smith, New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, p. 13 (emphasis added).

41 In the preface to Judeities, the editors of the volume, Joseph Cohen and RaphaelZagury-Orly, explain why they chose this rather unusual term: ‘We have chosen theterm judeity to express a certain equivocation, an unde!nable and undeterminablediversity, that may well constitute the interiority of Judaism today. In other words,judeity, as we evoke it, should in no way be understood as a more ‘authentic’reformulation of Jewish identity [ … ] That is the dual possibility of simultaneously

34 Introduction

questioning what is understood under the term judaism and interrogating the rela-tionship (if there is one) between Jacques Derrida’s writing – itself invariablyinscribed in the tension of the unde!nable – and those multiple judeities’ (Judeities,p. xi, emphasis added). Again, it is a wonderful description of Derrida’s extremelydelicate intentions of abstaining from a clear Judaic identi!cation, but as in thecase of Peter Eli Gordon depicting the intellectual condition of the Weimar Jewry,it lacks the component of bold assertiveness, equally present in Derrida’s ‘Jewish’writings, which I call here the Marrano strategy. As far as I know, only HeleneCixous goes as far as to attribute to Derrida openly ‘a desire to be a Marrano’which she, in ‘This Stranjew Body,’ compares to the Kafkan desire to be an Indian(Judeities, p. 56). Derrida ‘marinates himself ’ in his ‘Jewfeint’ mode (ibid.): ‘nor-catholic norjew midjew midsame midindian midhorse [ … ] He !nds himself, !ndshimself anew, in feint and truth, a marrano. An adoption that sits well with hisessential way of assenting to the secret, of giving to secrets their incalculable share’(ibid., p. 55). Also John Caputo called Derrida ‘Jewish without being Jewish’. SeeJohn D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion withoutReligion, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997, p. xvii.

42 Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 18.

43 This will be the topic of Chapter 5, ‘The identity of the Spirit’.44 Jacques Derrida, ‘Marx & Sons’, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on

Jacques Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’, ed. Michael Sprinker, London: Verso, 1999,pp. 248–249 (emphasis added).

45 See Derrida’s rejoinder to the contemporary Spinozists, Montag and Negri, whowish to do ‘new ontology’, i.e. stick to the actual, the present, and the reasonablypossible – ‘at the risk of restoring everything to order, to the grand order, but toorder’ (ibid., 257).

46 The antinomian intuition, which is the main speculative hero of this book, isprobably best explained by Horkheimer’s Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderem whichhe very clearly elucidates in his already-mentioned interview for German radio.Asked by the interlocutor: ‘Is this utter caution in dealing with the unknownderived from Jewish heritage?’ Horkheimer replies: ‘Yes, and in the same way thisutter caution has become an element of our social theory which we called theCritical Theory. “Thou shalt not make a graven image of God,” says the Bible.You cannot depict the absolute good [ … ] Should we not ask ourselves why thisshyness exists? No other religion apart from Judaism knows it.’ Quoted in PaulMendes-Flohr, Divided Passions, p. 374. The ‘shyness’, which avoids a full positiverepresentation of the ‘good-to-come’ is thus a particular and characteristic featureof Jewish heritage, yet at the same time, a feature that can – should – be commu-nicated universally, for it contains a valid ethical intuition that runs contrary to theChristian (or post-Christian) sense of an imminent ful!lment. On the latter issue, seemost of an inspired reply of Martin Buber to his Protestant interlocutor, ReverendSchmidt, who accused Jews of ‘blindness’ in regard to the divine incarnation ofJesus Christ: ‘We, Israel, understand in another fashion our inability to acceptthe Gospel [ … ] We know that universal history has not been rent to its founda-tions, that the world has not yet been redeemed.’ Martin Buber, ‘Church, State,Nation, Jewry’, in David W. McKain, ed., Christianity: Some Non-ChristianAppraisals, New York: McGraw Hill, 1964, p. 180; my emphasis.

47 The only signi!cant exception to this overwhelming tendency to mute the highapocalyptic tone of this particular Jewish generation is Michael Löwy whoseworks – Redemption and Utopia, as well as Elective A$nities – strongly championthe revolutionary schwung of the German-speaking Central European Jewry. Yetthe problem with Löwy is that while very pro-revolutionary, he is not at all anti-nomian; his model of social utopia remains !rmly entrenched in what he calls the

Introduction 35

Bachofenian speculation of Walter Benjamin, i.e. the image of the pre-historicalgolden age of the anti-hierarchical and promiscuous Muterrecht. In case of Löwy,therefore, we do not deal with the antinomian revolution, but with a ‘chthonianrevolution’ (which is a very apt name given to this phenomenon by Ned Lukacherin ‘Walter Benjamin and the Chthonian Revolution’, boundary 2, Vol. 11, No. 1–2,Autumn 1982–Winter 1983, pp. 41–57). There is, however, another importantexception, whom we can list as an ally without any doubts: Kenneth Seeskin, whoseCohen in#uenced work consistently paves way for the modern understandingof Jewish messianism with a strong antinomian twist. For instance, see his recentJewish Messianic Thoughts in an Age of Despair, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2012.

48 See Martin Kavka, Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 2: ‘As a result, this book vigorously rejectsthe Athens-Jerusalem problem that has been our pet mosquito, sucking our life-blood since the third century CE,’ i.e. from the times of Tertullian’s dramaticquestion.

49 Thus, when Kavka says that the change which occurred in Lévinas’ thought andwhich consisted in him dropping the term ‘meontology’ for the sake of ‘metaontology’is irrelevant, we can only say the contrary is true. It rather means that Lévinas, nolonger satis!ed with his never fully successful appropriation of Plato, gave up onthe meontological interpretation of his autremont qu’être and moved decisivelytowards a new idiom which – passing via the meta stage of separation – shouldeventually be called anti-ontology. It is precisely this anti-ontological, extremelyantinomian standpoint, rebelling against all nomos of the Earth, all possible laws ofbeing as such, which gives the severe, trenchant #avour to what Michael Fagenblatrightly calls Lévinas’ ‘ethical negative theology’ (see Michael Fagenblat, A Cove-nant of Creatures: Lévinas’ Philosophy of Judaism, Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2010, pp. 111–139). Kavka, however, is right, when he points to Lévinas’hesitations on that point (on the problems of Lévinas’ antinomianism, which neveractually reached the mature phase of an active anti-ontology, see Chapter 4 in thisvolume, ‘The antinomian symptom’). On the Hebrew anti-ontological pathos, seealso critical remarks of Jean-Francois Lyotard who, in his essay ‘Figure Fore-closed’, compares Jewish (and Lévinas’ particularly) wholesale rejection of being toa psychotic foreclosure. Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘Figure Foreclosed’, in LyotardReader, trans. Andrew Benjamin, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. It is also worth men-tioning here the ultra-critical position of Phillip Blond, the co-creator of RadicalOrthodoxy, who openly accuses Lévinas of Manichaeism: Phillip Blond, ‘EmmanuelLévinas: God and Phenomenology’, in Phillip Blond, ed., Post-Secular Philosophy:Between Philosophy and Theology, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 103–120.

50 The theme of Jewish messianism as di"ering radically from the Christian one,precisely because of its antinomian dimension, occurs frequently in Scholem wholinks it with the radical openness of the Jewish concept of the future, unconstrainedby any image of the already ful!lled messianic time: ‘[The Christian] world is builton the principle that redemption already took place and the Redeemer had alreadyappeared, so even if the work of redemption itself is not yet completed, it none-theless had begun and does not o"er a hope in a wholly other distant future[ein ferne Zukunftho#nung]’: Gershom Scholem, ‘Ursprünge, Widerspruche undAuswirkungen des Sabbatianismus’, in Judaica 5, Frankfurt am Main: SuhrkampVerlag, 1992, p. 123. The same motif emerges in the recent work of Willi Goetschelwho also focuses on the open future horizon of the Jewish messianic thought as themost characteristic ‘Jewish di"erence’ which modern Jewish philosophy guards anddevelops: ‘In reclaiming the messianic as a project of philosophy in oppositionto theology, Jewish philosophy from Spinoza to Derrida foregrounds the task torespond to the messianic philosophically rather than contain and discipline it

36 Introduction

theologically. More than a border dispute between philosophy and theology orbetween Jewish and Christian claims, the issue is to open philosophy to innovation,change, and the open future to come.’ Willi Goetschel, The Discipline of Philosophyand the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought, New York: Fordham UniversityPress, 2013, p. 15. And when I talk about the ‘antinomian spectre’ as hovering bothmenacingly and messianically over the all too ‘positive’ modern thought, Goetschelingeniously pseudonames this ghost as dybbuk: ‘Jewish philosophy then, it could besaid, is philosophy’s dybbuk: the marginalized, muted, and repressed that returnsand haunts the claim to universalism that excludes and silences what could enrichit’ (ibid., 7).

51 Scholem, ‘Ursprünge, Widerspruche und Auswirkungen des Sabbatianismus’, p. 12052 On the Barthian inspiration of Lévinas, compare, for instance, this fragment from

The Epistle to the Romans: ‘The decision lies in our answer to the question – Dowe, in the unknowable, apprehend and love the Unknown God? Do we, in thecomplete Otherness of the other [ … ] hear the voice of the One? [.] If I hear in theneighbour only the voice of the other and not also the voice of the One [ … ] – then,quite certainly, the voice of the One is nowhere to be heard.’ Karl Barth, TheEpistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns, Oxford: Oxford University Press,1968, pp. 494–495 (emphasis in original).

Introduction 37