Arnon Grunberg

Today

Essence

On the non-Jewish Jew - Eli Zaretsky in LRB:

“Many Jews today feel torn. On the one hand, they feel loyalty to Israel, the land of their fellow Jews, many of whom were driven to that country by persecution. On the other hand, they recognise that Israel has been committing crimes against humanity, which are essentially racially driven. They want to oppose Israel’s wars, but they want to do it as Jews. Is there a specifically Jewish way to address this conflict? I believe there is.
In his Philosophy of History, Hegel wrote: Religion is the consciousness that a people has of what it itself is and of the essence of supreme being ... A people that takes nature for its God cannot be a free people; only when it regards God as a Spirit that transcends nature does it become free and Spirit itself.
By taking nature for a God, Hegel does not only mean the many forms of Mesopotamian and Egyptian polytheism, against which the ancient Hebrews defined their monotheism. He also means the identification of God with the ties of consanguinity that are the basis of ethnic-tribal communities. When God is posited outside nature, the inner unity of these communities dissolves and the natural ties of common descent are no longer recognised as binding.”

(…)

“Judaism, then, was founded on a paradox: on the one hand, a promised land for a chosen people; on the other, a God that transcends all locations and identities. Both were intrinsic to Judaism’s early identity. For more than 2500 years, the Jews survived in diaspora by drawing on both. Beginning with the Babylonian captivity (597-539 BC), they survived in part by defining themselves as a separate people, regulating marriage, kashrut, circumcision and other rituals, which is how all ethnic groups survive, down to the present.
At the same time, they also survived because of their conviction that they possessed a unique and wonderful idea of God: a God that created the universe out of nothing, as opposed to one that emerged out of some primal matter, and therefore retained a connection to the natural world, which revealed itself in the form of magic, polytheism or idolatry, including the idolatry of blood ties.”

(…)

“The great reckoning in Jewish history was not the Holocaust or the founding of Israel, as many claim today, but rather the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions, when the Jews were released from their ghettos and became citizens.”

(…)

“This was the period in which Freud called himself a ‘Godless Jew’, and in which Isaac Deutscher coined the phrase ‘non-Jewish Jews’ to describe Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Freud, all of whom were Jewish by birth but, in Deutscher’s words, ‘found Jewry too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting’ – in a word, too ethnic. I might add to the list Einstein, Benjamin, Derrida and Deutscher himself, all of whom saw Judaism as at the core of their identity and all of whom shaped the modern world indelibly for the better.”

(…)

“Finally, one may legitimately ask: if Jews define themselves in terms of modern ideals of universality, justice, equality and so on, why are they not simply liberals? Why do we need Judaism at all? My short answer to that is that historic liberalism has never been truly universal, but is deeply imbued with Christian ideas of progress, salvation and redemption, gained via the British and American nation-states, which is why the figures that Deutscher cited, including Freud, were socialists and radicals, not liberals. Judaism, then, is still necessary, even if Zionism is not. Not until we have a genuine universality can we say that the Jewish contribution to world history has been exhausted. When we try to specify what that contribution is, we have to say that nationalist ideals play an ever smaller role in it. In the 1935 preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo, Freud poses a question for the non-Zionist Jew: ‘Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left to you that is Jewish?’ He replies: ‘A great deal, and probably its very essence.”

Read the article here.

I can recommend Deutscher to all human beings.

If we want to overcome tribalism, we should become non-Jewish Jews, I’m not sure if that’s the same as the post-Zionistic Jew, but that’s a detail.

Also, I’m not sure if truly universal liberalism resembles the Messiah.

But why not, we are waiting for universal liberalism so we can stop being the non-Jewish Jew. We are non-Jewish Jews because the Messiah of true universalism has not arrived yet.

This is all fine with me.

But what if even the Enlightenment was at least partly a false Messiah?

Essentialism can be a trap as well.

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