When the Jew reaches a certain awareness of the limits of his own nature — when he grasps, through the scientific revolution, the limits of his metaphysics in relation to the world, or, through biblical criticism, the limits of his Torah's claim on the absolute — he is left carrying a long burden of suffering that is, rationally speaking, largely without meaning.
But within that meaninglessness he still carries another metaphysics, one in which he seeks to become redeemer and victim at once. This is the universal Jew, who wants to save the world and is prepared, in varying degrees, to sacrifice his own essence — having first persuaded himself that his Jewishness is not an essence at all.
The most abstract place is also the most intimate one. It is the place we ourselves, as Jews, flee from. Why is our God ours and not everyone's? And yet everyone took Him, or tried to take Him, from us. Perhaps the Jew, having seen how many came to take, chooses instead to give: to hand over that intimacy to others of his own accord. To give the gift of God through self-sacrifice — that is Jesus. To give the gift of Eden through the sacrifice of others — that is Marx. These are the only two ways left to a man who can no longer give the gift through the Law itself, which is to say, through a conversation with the Tanakh.
The first thing he sacrifices, not necessarily out of malice, is the honor and the knowledge of the inheritance of his Torah, and the transmission of it — each man for his own reasons. This does not mean that the secular Jew is a universal Jew, but the statistical correlation between the two — except within the Zionist movement, which is a middle path between them — is very clear. And even here, in the Zionist movement, the founding Zionism was universal in its ideology, and in no small part radically Marxist and revolutionary.
Sometimes he does not sacrifice his inheritance but sifts it. He takes from it what can serve his universality and harnesses his Jewishness accordingly. At this stage, after a generation or two, he also loses the capacity to know or to grasp what it was he sifted. He is walking a road that — apart from its preservation in a Jewish body — a living collective, not a doctrine — in the Land of Israel — will not allow him a return to the fundamental national source.
By now he has sacrificed nationhood and religion in most cases, which places American Jewry in a very awkward position. They have already sacrificed the religious dimension. Now they are asked to sacrifice Jewish nationhood as well — the Jews being, as is known, a religion and a nation at once. For what? Perhaps in order to prove that the universal Jew is genuinely universal, that he knows how to rebuke his own brothers; and what greater proof could there be. And perhaps for the sake of his need to be redeemer and victim at once. And the redeemer and the victim together are a divine thing. They are, in fact, Jesus.
There is an ontological challenge here, one Emil Fackenheim confronted: the challenge of preserving the Jewish body as a commandment after the Holocaust. It is a large question. Mordecai Kaplan speaks of it too. The difficulty is that the return this demands — to the Jewish body, to the Jewish land, and to the obligation to preserve them — may appear, in the eyes of those who look at themselves as the gentiles look at them, to mark Jewish particularity as a problem in itself. That intimate gaze is precisely what disappears, and its disappearance is what allows the Jewish people to be dissolved into a people like any other, and the gentile to attach himself to it.
The only way to redeem this condition is through conversation with God. Conversation with the Tanakh. The obligation to the Jewish condition — and even the obligation to redeem the world in the name of a universal Jewishness — must be generated out of a conversation with the Tanakh, because it is the humanist ground that makes universality possible and the textual ground that makes Jewishness possible.
Any universalism or humanism not rooted in the Tanakh — and above all in the duality between the human condition of Genesis 2–3 ("in pain you shall bring forth children," "by the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread," the barring of the tree of life, and the states of envy and human feeling) and the attempt to rise above that condition in the story of Israel's redemption in the wilderness — will struggle to recognize itself as Jewish, whether universal or particular. These are the very materials from which the universal we are trying to redeem is made. Otherwise the interpretation of his own condition passes into the hands of the historical action of a wider public that does not necessarily see the universal moment in the Tanakh itself.
Jewish secularization adopts, develops, offers and sells a revolt against the decrees of the Tanakh by means of ideology. The poor shall never cease from the land? Socialism. In pain you shall bring forth children, and he shall rule over you? Feminism. The man has become as one of us, knowing good and evil — and the tree of life is barred to him? Deterministic materialism and scientism. The move from the unknowing of Eden to the shame that follows the eating, and the sorting between the two? Psychology.
The Jew returns to the universal decrees of Genesis after the particular experience of redemption in the four later books — except that he comes to rescue the universal condition without the divine and legal revelation he underwent afterward, and out of a rejection of the human, communal experience he lived through.
Memory and Covenant:
There is a further matter here. Ethics requires memory. Without it there is no way to turn a divine or a social order into an image, a faculty, a workable function of the mind. And memory in turn requires covenant. For you were slaves in the land of Egypt. is the recurring justification of nearly every social commandment in the Torah. Not utility, and not reason, but memory.
Universality is by definition without covenant and without memory, since both are internal to a community of believers. And so the Jew sets out to produce them from the outside — through formal law, as liberalism, and through revolution and justice, as socialism. But in both he produces a memory without a people, and paradoxically goes on demanding an ethical existence from it.
It will be said that socialism has a memory of its own, a memory of struggle. But it is the memory of a class and not of a people, and worse, a memory designed to dissolve at the moment of redemption. For once social redemption is achieved, every ethical behavior has already been preconditioned on a counter-existence to the bourgeoisie, and without that counter-existence it has no content left. A covenant, by contrast, is not annulled by its own fulfillment. It is remembered again in every generation.
And here the distinction returns in another form. Jesus builds the memory out of his own suffering; Marx builds it out of the suffering of another. The Jew who does the second does it in the name of his own suffering, and so does not need the suffering of the other to be real — he needs it to be available.
None of this makes a universal ethics impossible. It makes it impossible without a bearer. A light unto the nations requires that someone hold the lamp, and holding it is precisely what a covenant is for. The kingdom of priests is not a metaphor for the abolition of the priests.
And that is very nearly impossible.
The German Question:
Hence, incidentally, the pull of Jews toward German secularization and toward the Germans in general, more than toward the English variety and the English. German secularization, like Jewish secularization, is a secularization of demolition rather than of the development of monotheistic foundations, as the English one was. It is a secularization that seeks to exploit and to empty out the resources. The difference between the Jew and the German inside that shared project is that at a certain point the German casts the Jew as the source of the need for demolition, while the Jew is by then so deeply invested in the project that he grasps it only late. From there one can understand what Horkheimer and Adorno argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment: that enlightenment, left to its own logic, reverts into barbarism.
It will be said that the attraction was a matter of geography — that Jews met German philosophy because they lived in the German-speaking world, where emancipation happened and where the great communities were. But geography explains where the encounter took place. It does not explain what was chosen inside it.
Nor is it true that no other path was attempted. Hermann Cohen sat at the heart of German philosophy and built his universal ethics out of the development of Jewish sources rather than out of revolt against them. He was not forgotten because he was wrong. He was forgotten because the next generation of German Jewry — Benjamin, Bloch, Adorno, Marcuse — no longer sought to develop, but to demolish and to build anew. And Rosenzweig, who came out of Cohen and had nearly converted, is the one who understood that going out of oneself is not redemption but absorption.
The Types:
And here we arrive at the question of Jewish secularization, at its particular character, and at the fact that Zionism is only a partial secularization — because at bottom it is a messianic and particular energy.
Jewish secularization rests in no small measure on assimilation. Assimilation as a redeeming agent. Zionism comes and says: assimilation is indeed a redeeming agent, but within a particular frame. The ground on which radical and moderate secularization might be reconciled is the question of whether the Jewish body must exist at all. And on that question we find a messianic instinct in the very man who has ended his conversation with the Tanakh: it is precisely he who will offer himself up at the stake as a new Tanakh for the world. The radicals, then, are the messianists, since they believe that through self-sacrifice the world can be redeemed and a new ethical codex and a new Eden produced. The Zionists, who seek to redeem one people only, believe that through the sacrifice of religion above all, the Jewish condition can be redeemed and a refuge created. And there are those in between, who believe that Zionism and refuge can work alongside universalism.
And finally there is the quiet assimilationist. He claims no title, issues no universal call, wrestles with no texts. He denies the Abrahamic-Hebraic monotheism not out of revulsion, not out of feeling, not out of quarrel. He can exist in Tel Aviv and in Amsterdam alike. Politics does not interest him. Nor does Israel. He drifts, and becomes the absolute universal. The absolute human.
And perhaps the absence of humanity in the antisemite's description of the Jew is not only the inheritance of a gnostic Christianity and Islam, patricides in their relation to the legacy of Israel, which they copied illegitimately. Perhaps it is also the radical particularity of the founding Jewish father, who does not show his cards. Who begets, but does not encompass. Who produces, but stands apart — and who by this, whether strong or weak, presents an almost inhuman quality, on account of which a good many of those universalists insist on persuading the gentiles that they too are human beings. A persuasion so difficult that to achieve it would be, for them, like becoming God. And who knows — perhaps that is the wish of every phenomenon that seeks to go out of itself into the world.
Proving Himself:
And there is the need to prove himself. To prove the universality that exists in him even though he comes from a particular place. The need is so extreme that he comes to see the abolition of his own particular root as an example to be held up for the whole world. *Behold the Jew who is willing to shed his own magnificent selfhood — why should you remain with yours?* Paul of Tarsus shed the Law; Jesus shed his body. The divine Law and the Jewish body are cast off as well. The world must advance. Advance comes from the abolition of particularity, and no Jew can stop it — only God. And least of all when the Jew is the one advancing it.
So what is the story of the Jewish universalist? For the Jews he becomes a footnote. For the world he becomes an active force.
And there is a further paradox, perhaps the gravest. He demands permanent revolution, but what he asks to come after it, he asks for quietly. The redemption he demands is universal and therefore revolutionary, but the quiet he longs for afterward is a bourgeois quiet. He wants normalcy. He wants to be like any man — at home, in the city, unwatched. And so he finds himself imprisoned in the very same paradox that held him in the ghetto with his sidelocks and his beard, except that this time the prison is not other people's but his own. There he was set apart and wanted quiet; here he abolishes his apartness and still wants quiet; and in both cases the revolution he carries will not grant it to him.
The World Is Not a Community:
When Moses dies at a hundred and twenty, the whole people weeps. The whole people mourns the man who sacrificed his own selfhood for their sake. When the universal Jew sacrifices himself for the world, the world of course will not weep for him. Because the world is not a community. The Jew imagines the world as a community for reasons both psychological and philosophical.
Marx created a chosen people. The neo-Marxists exchanged the chosen peoples for identities and minorities. A revolutionary mechanism seeking to reenact the revolution of the Exodus is what we have had since the modern world arrived at relative self-consciousness in the Reformation.
Are the non-Jewish revolutionary mechanisms better than the Jewish ones? Perhaps. Between the universal and the particular, is the lesson that one should flee revolutionary mechanisms altogether? Also perhaps. Is there a better chance of being a light unto the nations from outside a small and seemingly closed group, so that the revolutionary mechanisms of the gentiles might be healthier and sturdier? Perhaps. And perhaps it was religious Judaism's unwillingness to come out of itself that forced only the secular ones to go out — and with their going, to abandon the literature of the Bible and to act only on psycho-romantic whims.
The universal, though, need not be political. He simply becomes universal rather than Jewish by way of a new social field, which, being a social field, is itself political. Nor must the movement out of Judaism be political. That the universal goes out toward the gentile, who sees the Jew as an "other," and is thereby political, says nothing about the going out itself.
But he is revolutionary in his attempt to speak of a whole humanism that requires no differences. And he is liable to begin at home, and to see Jewishness itself, and Jews themselves, as the others.
Philosophically, knowing the nuances of every people and tribe is also, to some degree, knowledge of the world, or of the particular modes of thought of cultures. In this Hegel was right: he saw knowledge of the world through the particular, and held that a universal not embodied in a particular remains abstract and empty. Perhaps this was always the essential weakness of the Jewish universalist. In the exhilaration of going out of himself, he did not understand what non-Jewish potentials he was entering, and entering himself into. He was entirely blind to them. In fleeing from himself, he was blinded to the limits and the needs of the non-Jewish objects of his redemption. For him every revolution is always a permanent revolution, because he must also try to transform the nature of the object being redeemed.
That much is obvious; there is no discovery in it. The discovery is that his picture of those nuances is delusional. Dreamlike and unreal — a portrait of peoples drawn from what he needs them to be. Just as the world has imposed a double standard on Israel for eighty years, so the universal Jew imposes a double standard on the world. He asks the world for self-knowledge and self-abolition at once. He asks everyone to redeem the other, because in the long run you cannot redeem only yourself and remain safe enough to stand exposed in such a world. The world, perhaps, he wants to turn into a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. In his own image.
True, there is an exhilaration here that did not exist before — of the blood of workers, of minorities, of the wretched. No longer the blood of Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt, dulled across the pages of legend. And it is not claimed that his universal fulfillment is necessarily only the antithesis of his Jewish essence. Humanism does not owe itself to these Jews, and neither does radical secularization. But this is a kind of consciousness that no member of any other religion could aspire to in leaving his religion. It is a different case, and a less elegant one. Very human. A belief that you can know yourself only through an absolute otherness you gather into. A pan-humanist romance.
The Only Successful One:
Christianity is the only Jewish revolution that managed to join the two. It carried a universal redemption, and it arrived in the end at the bourgeois quiet as well, when it became a church and a state. And we all know what became of us in the wake of that success.
So the question comes home. What remains to us of Judaism — chiefly love of one's fellow, love of man, love of the Name. Is the people of Israel required for that? That we can leave to history to answer.
The product of Semitism and antisemitism at once.
