The end of Judaism
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, September 30, 2024
One cannot understand the meaning of what is happening now in Israel, if one does not understand that Zionism constitutes a double negation of the historical reality of Judaism. Not only, in fact, because it transfers the Christian nation-state to the Jews, Zionism represents the culmination of that process of assimilation which, starting from the end of 18th century, has been progressively erasing Jewish identity. The decisive point is that, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has shown in an exemplary study, as foundation of Zionist consciousness stands another negation, the negation of the Galut, that is, of exile as a principle common to all historical forms of Judaism as we know it. The premises of the concept of exile are prior to the destruction of the Second Temple and are already present in biblical literature. Exile is the very form of the existence of the Jews on earth, and the whole Jewish tradition, from the Mishnah to the Talmud, from the architecture of the synagogue to the memory of biblical events, was conceived and lived out in the perspective of exile. For an Orthodox Jew, even the Jews who live in the state of Israel are in exile. And the State according to the Torah, which the Jews await with the coming of the Messiah, has nothing to do with a modern national state, so much so that at its centre stand just the reconstruction of the Temple and the restoration of the sacrifices, which the state of Israel does not even want to hear about. And it is well not to forget that exile according to Judaism is not only the condition of the Jews, but concerns the defective condition of the world in its integrity. According to some Kabbalists, including Luria, exile defines the very situation of the divinity, which created the world by exiling itself from itself and this exile will last until the advent of the Tiqqun, that is, the restoration of the original order.
It is just this unreserved acceptance of exile, with the rejection it entails of any present form of statehood, that establishes the superiority of the Jews over religions and peoples that have compromised themselves with the State. The Jews are, together with the Gypsies, the only people who have rejected the state form, have not waged wars and have never stained themselves with the blood of other peoples.
By denying exile and diaspora at their roots in the name of a national state, Zionism has therefore betrayed the very essence of Judaism. We should not be surprised then if this removal has produced another exile, that of the Palestinians and has led the state of Israel to identify itself with the most extreme and ruthless forms of the modern nation-state. The tenacious claim of history, from which the diaspora according to the Zionists would have excluded the Jews, goes in the same direction. But this could mean that Judaism, which did not die in Auschwitz, now perhaps knows its end.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, September 30, 2024
One cannot understand the meaning of what is happening now in Israel, if one does not understand that Zionism constitutes a double negation of the historical reality of Judaism. Not only, in fact, because it transfers the Christian nation-state to the Jews, Zionism represents the culmination of that process of assimilation which, starting from the end of 18th century, has been progressively erasing Jewish identity. The decisive point is that, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has shown in an exemplary study, as foundation of Zionist consciousness stands another negation, the negation of the Galut, that is, of exile as a principle common to all historical forms of Judaism as we know it. The premises of the concept of exile are prior to the destruction of the Second Temple and are already present in biblical literature. Exile is the very form of the existence of the Jews on earth, and the whole Jewish tradition, from the Mishnah to the Talmud, from the architecture of the synagogue to the memory of biblical events, was conceived and lived out in the perspective of exile. For an Orthodox Jew, even the Jews who live in the state of Israel are in exile. And the State according to the Torah, which the Jews await with the coming of the Messiah, has nothing to do with a modern national state, so much so that at its centre stand just the reconstruction of the Temple and the restoration of the sacrifices, which the state of Israel does not even want to hear about. And it is well not to forget that exile according to Judaism is not only the condition of the Jews, but concerns the defective condition of the world in its integrity. According to some Kabbalists, including Luria, exile defines the very situation of the divinity, which created the world by exiling itself from itself and this exile will last until the advent of the Tiqqun, that is, the restoration of the original order.
It is just this unreserved acceptance of exile, with the rejection it entails of any present form of statehood, that establishes the superiority of the Jews over religions and peoples that have compromised themselves with the State. The Jews are, together with the Gypsies, the only people who have rejected the state form, have not waged wars and have never stained themselves with the blood of other peoples.
By denying exile and diaspora at their roots in the name of a national state, Zionism has therefore betrayed the very essence of Judaism. We should not be surprised then if this removal has produced another exile, that of the Palestinians and has led the state of Israel to identify itself with the most extreme and ruthless forms of the modern nation-state. The tenacious claim of history, from which the diaspora according to the Zionists would have excluded the Jews, goes in the same direction. But this could mean that Judaism, which did not die in Auschwitz, now perhaps knows its end.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Marc Chagall, The dance of Myriam, 1966. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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