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‘The Passion of Israel’: the True Israel According to Levinas, or Judaism ‘as a Category of Being’

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Abstract

Across four decades of writing, Levinas repeatedly referred to the Holocaust as ‘the Passion of Israel at Auschwitz’. This deliberately Christological interpretation of the Holocaust raises questions about the respective roles of Judaism and Christianity in Levinas’ thought and seems at odds with his well-known view that suffering is ‘useless’. Basing my interpretation on the journals Levinas wrote as a prisoner of war and a radio talk he delivered in September 1945, I argue that his philosophical project is best understood as an ontological rendering of Judaism that accounts for the opening or transcendence of sense and intelligibility. Judaism provides Levinas with a salient critique of liberal and idealist philosophies of the subject and an alternative to fundamental ontology. I show how Levinas’ account of the ‘Passion of Israel’ can be read within the exegetical history of Jewish accounts of divine suffering and thereby effects a reversal of the Christian typological gaze. I conclude by suggesting that Levinas’ recourse to Judaism as a philosophical category does not assume a dogmatic origin to philosophy but ‘formally indicates’, in the Heideggerian sense, the phenomenological origins of normativity. In this respect, the ‘Passion of Israel’ involves not only a reversal of the Christian typological gaze but also a deconstruction of Judaism.

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Notes

  1. Levinas, 2009, p. 75. Unless stated, translations from the Carnets de captivité are mine. As the editors of the Carnets note (Levinas 2009, p. 75, notes a. and b.), here and elsewhere in these notebooks ‘J.’ is clearly shorthand for ‘Judaism’ (or perhaps ‘Juif,’ though not much hinges on this distinction for my purposes). The idea of concrete ontological ‘categories’ is central to Being and Time. Heidegger transposes Kant’s formal categories of understanding into ontological ‘existentalia’ that gives rise to and structure the concrete dynamic senses of being.

  2. Levinas (1934; 1935); for the biographical details, see Lescourret (1994), pp. 118–28 and Malka (2006), pp. 64–82.

  3. We find reference to the Holocaust as the Passion of Israel in confessional works that were mostly presented in a Jewish context, for example, in essays on Franz Rosenzweig, Moses Mendelssohn, and Vladimir Jankelevitch, in interviews with Myriam Anessovic, in his ‘Forward’ to Beyond the Verse, in ‘Demanding Judaism,’ ‘Assimilation and New Culture,’ ‘Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,’ and ‘From Ethics to Exegesis’ and in several Talmudic readings (‘Who Plays Last?’, ‘For a Place in the Bible,’ ‘The Translation of Scripture’, ‘Beyond Memory’).

  4. Drawing on Moyn (2009), Moore sensibly portrays Bloy’s account of the Jews as a ‘philosemitism that relies upon antisemitic discourse and symbols in the putative service of Jews so as to dismiss, reject or reverse the evaluation of stereotypes against them, ‘flirting with the taboo’ of anti-semitism in unstable ways (Moore, p. 273; citing Moyn 2009, p. 15)’. Hand astutely notes the intriguing effects of Levinas’ appropriation of Bloy’s deeply ambivalent, even perilous philosemitism (which nevertheless contributed markedly to the revision of Catholic attitudes to the Jews in the early twentieth century). If Bloy’s ‘paranoid soteriology projects the Jew as necessarily damned and elect, and the doppelgänger sacrificial victim of the Christ’, nevertheless when one frees oneself from narrow interpretative orthodoxies regarding Levinas, ‘one immediately sees how an extremity of condemnation and redemption, figured often in Bloy as reversibility and vicarious suffering by the feminine other not only suggests a fascinating alliance of ideas here, but in the context of an identity isolated and threatened as Jewish in extreme circumstances, even an absolute overturning that itself can be perhaps overturned through incorporation of its almost blaspheming excesses (Hand, 58)’. To this, I want to add that the ‘Passion of Israel at Auschwitz’ shows how Levinas continued to deploy this overturning of blaspheming excesses throughout his work, in the very name of ‘ethics’. Using Hand’s terminology, my view could be put in nuce: ethics is the blaspheming excess of Judaism, which already typologically appropriates and therefore blasphemingly exceeds Christianity.

    It bears noting that although Levinas would undoubtedly have known of Bloy’s exaltation of the wandering, afflicted Jew in texts like Salvation from the Jews (1892) and The Old Man of the Mountain (1911), he only cites and refers to Bloy’s Letters to His Fiancée (1922), a text in which Jews and Judaism are not mentioned but through which Levinas evidently saw fundamental aspects of both Judaism and femininity; see Levinas 1990b, p. 86.

  5. My thanks to Sarah Hammerschlag for sharing her unpublished work with me (Hammerschlag 2015) and for her pioneering contributions to this new stage of Levinas research.

  6. The sense in which ‘the Passion of Israel’ is an allegory depends on how one understands ‘allegory’. I would argue for an account of allegoresis as aiming at something like what Heidegger means to accomplish with the method of ‘formal indication’, namely a horizontal saying otherwise of a determined content for the sake of releasing its general significance.

  7. Wiesel, like Levinas, invites a Christological readings of the Holocaust. In Night, p. 72, the narrator imagines Rabbi Akiva Dumer confronting God ‘in this Calvary’. Naomi Seidman suggests that Wiesel accommodated the French revision (which the English translates) of his Yiddish memoir to the sensibilities of the Catholic Nobel Laureate François Mauriac, who played a decisive role in its publication; see Seidman and also Idinopulos. Léon Bloy would play an analogous role in Levinas’ trope to the one played by Mauriac for Wiesel.

  8. For example, Levinas (Levinas 1990a), p. 264 and (1994a), p. 8. Howard Caygill, pp. 162–64, emphasizes this, though I think he overstates the case. Unlike the Passion of Israel, the notion of Israel’s resurrection as a state is only rarely entertained by Levinas and is never, to my knowledge, given a capital R. It therefore seems more of a rhetorical flurry than an elaboration of the ontological or theological significance of Israel’s Passion. Moreover, the idea of the State of Israel as a resurrection, in the sort of way that prominent religious Zionists such as R. Tzvi Yehuda Kook understood it, contradicts everything else Levinas consistently said about the diasporic nature of being Jewish; on this, see Hammerschlag (2010), chapter 3, for a fine analysis.

  9. Indeed, something like this view is what gives Levinas’ thought philosophical plausibility and phenomenological legitimacy and makes it more than a religious anthropology. Such a view presumably explains the sway of Levinas’ work over theorists who are deaf or even hostile to religion, for religious terms and concepts appear on every page of it and yet many people seem to think it can stand independently of those connotations.

  10. This distinction is analogous to the one Heidegger introduced between revealability (Offenbarkeit) and revelation (Offenbarung); about which see Derrida, pp. 43–44.

  11. Translation modified from Hammerschlag 2012, p. 402f. I am taking Levinas’ indicative association of Judaism with persecution in this passage as the starting point for his development of the notion of ‘the Passion of Israel’. But as Martin Kavka notes (personal communication), this passage appears in a series of notes in the Carnets on Proust. In 1947, the same year that that ‘Being Jewish’ appeared, Levinas published ‘The Other in Proust’ in Deucalion 2. Here, he suggests that Proust’s great contribution is to have shown how the inner life of emotion involves a relation with the strangeness of others, thus dividing and doubling the self, whose truth becomes ‘the soul of the soul’ (Levinas 1947b, p. 102; cf. Levinas 2009, p. 179). In her recent and forthcoming work, Hammerschlag proposes, rightly I think, that in the 1940s Levinas found this intrasociality of the self in both religion and literature before eventually privileging religion as the indicative way of accessing it. This decision in favour of religion over literature is, I think, less substantive than tactical. If in truth religion and literature both bear witness to the normative intrasociality of the self, if theology and literature, Job and Proust, equally attest to ‘the soul of the soul’, the boundedness of oneself to the mystery of others, the ‘strangeness that laughs in the face of knowledge’ (Levinas 1947b, p. 102), Levinas wagers that this secret, which philosophy may be unable to discern or explicitly thematize, is factically indicated more readily and more manifestly in religious than in literary life.

  12. On this point, Levinas differed and therefore diverged from Derrida, for whom Jewishness can be emancipated from Judaism; see Derrida 2007, p. 32, summarizing Derrida 1996.

  13. Note that Levinas does not yet include the Talmud among that which is worthy of study in the Jewish tradition. It was in 1947 that Levinas met Chouchani, with whom he studied Talmud in the years following. The Carnets help us understand Levinas’s philosophical motivations for studying the Talmud.

  14. As it is called in The Oldest System Program of German Idealism, a text generally attributed to Hegel, sometimes to Hölderlin, and which was first discovered by Rosenzweig in 1917 who attributed it to Schelling. For the text in English see Hölderlin, pp. 154–56; for a discussion of its attribution and reception see Hansen.

  15. But see Levinas 1974, p. 195n.12 for a use of ‘compassion’ that is compatible with the sense I am giving it.

  16. In Totality and Infinity Levinas uses the word ‘religion’ for this very purpose, but in many ways, the word ‘religion’ is more problematic than the word ‘myth’. The rabbinic texts I am citing, like the trope of a Passion at Auschwitz and the ‘storyline’ of Totality and Infinity, would seem to belong more readily to myth than religion. This sort of view of myth is compatible with Ricoeur 1967.

  17. The first part of this paragraph is indebted to Rembaum, though translations are my own. I am grateful to George Kohler for drawing this material to my attention. For a thorough discussion of the nineteenth century Jewish ‘mission theologies’ in which Israel is often depicted as the Messiah nation who suffers vicariously for the sake of a world cause, see the texts and introduction in Kohler.

  18. Cohen, ch. XIII. The relation, both conceptual and historical, between Cohen’s and Levinas’ respective accounts of messianic history deserves more attention than I can give it here.

  19. The interpretation I have proposed also suggests an answer to the fourth objection, which concerned Levinas’ apparently ‘disincarnate’ account of transcendence. To demonstrate this, however, would require more space than I have at this point.

  20. The opening remarks of Time and the Other, lectures Levinas delivered in 1946/47 that outline the argument which will be fleshed out in Totality and Infinity, makes it clear that Levinas is here still trying to indicate a different starting point for understanding the intrasociality of the self than Geworfenheit provides. At the end of these lectures, Levinas sketches a problematic notion of ‘the feminine’ for which he credits Bloy with inspiration. The Carnets de captivité open new ways of understanding Levinas’s earliest post-war publications, as we have seen with the essays on Proust and ‘Being Jewish’.

  21. Around the cover of De l'Existence à l'Existant, which also appeared in 1947, as did ‘Being Jewish,’—and which likewise requires re-reading in light of Levinas’s diaries—a band was placed around the cover that said: ‘où il ne s'agit pas d'angoisse’.

  22. John Van Buren reads the notion of formal indication precisely in this deconstructive fashion. He concludes that Heidegger himself failed to heed the task of formal indication by conflating Dasein’s sociality with the ‘world view’ of National Socialism when what was required was a ‘negative, skeptical, deconstructive’ access to the way of being together (van Buren, p. 169).

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Correspondence to Michael Fagenblat.

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I am indebted to Martin Kavka for the generous and valuable criticisms.

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Fagenblat, M. ‘The Passion of Israel’: the True Israel According to Levinas, or Judaism ‘as a Category of Being’. SOPHIA 54, 297–320 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-015-0463-3

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