Research

19 pages, 331 KiB

Open AccessArticle

God of Montaigne, Spinoza, and Derrida—The Marrano (Crypto)Theology of Survival

by Agata Bielik-Robson

Religions 2023, 14(3), 421; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14030421 - 20 Mar 2023

Viewed by 1292

In this essay I offer an outline of a theology of survival as it emerges from the writings of the three modern Marrano thinkers: Michel de Montaigne, Baruch Spinoza, and Jacques Derrida. I will argue that, in their thought which is deeply concerned [...] Read more.

In this essay I offer an outline of a theology of survival as it emerges from the writings of the three modern Marrano thinkers: Michel de Montaigne, Baruch Spinoza, and Jacques Derrida. I will argue that, in their thought which is deeply concerned with the apology of life, the Marrano choice of living on over the martyrological death becomes affirmed as the right thing to do despite the price of forced conversion—and that this choice, once reflected and accepted, modifies the Jewish doctrine of life (torat hayim), by adding to it a new messianic dimension. In my interpretation, the Marranos will emerge as the agents of the messianic inversion, leading from the tragic predicament of the victims of coercion to the radical hope of the “rejected stones” and capable of once again reinventing and rejuvenating the messianic message of the Abrahamic religions, conceived as God’s superior commandment to choose life. From Montaigne, through Spinoza, to Derrida, life understood primarily as survival becomes an object of a new affirmation: it begins to glow as a secret treasure of Judaism which the Marranos simultaneously left behind and preserved in a new messianic-universal form. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion and Modern Jewish Thought: Volume II)

26 pages, 376 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Modern Shia Islamic and Jewish Political Theosophy: An Elective Affinity?

by Ezra Tzfadya

Religions 2023, 14(2), 176; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14020176 - 29 Jan 2023

Viewed by 3534

Abstract

The present study will focus on core parallels and nodes of theopolitical exchange between the two most politically and theologically consequential jurist “theosophers” of the twentieth century, the Religious Zionist founding father, the Jewish Rav Avraham Yitzchak Hacohen Kook (1865–1935), and the Shia [...] Read more.

The present study will focus on core parallels and nodes of theopolitical exchange between the two most politically and theologically consequential jurist “theosophers” of the twentieth century, the Religious Zionist founding father, the Jewish Rav Avraham Yitzchak Hacohen Kook (1865–1935), and the Shia Islamic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900–1989). Unquestioned masters of the tradition of both medieval philosophy and mysticism, as well as the theosophies of the early-modern and modern eras, both Kook and Khomeini attempted to embed the rhetoric of theosophy within revolutionary notions of both clerical religious authority and the necessity of their respective nomoi to assume political form. The study will also correlate contemporary Shia reformist theosophies undergirded with anti-theocratic exoteric postures with pre-WW2 German-Jewish “existence philosophies” as represented by Franz Rosenzweig, noting a common appreciation for what the study will term “theopolitical risk”. It argues that the retrieval of medieval Judeo-Islamic political philosophy for the successful negotiation of reason and revelation in modernity against both theocratic juridical extremism and the iron cages of positivistic-realist secularism must be rethought in light of the theopolitics coursing through Iran and Israel, two states at the geographic periphery though fully within the horizons of the Modern West. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion and Modern Jewish Thought: Volume II)

12 pages, 313 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Birth, Sehnsucht and Creation: Reading Buber between Plato and Kierkegaard

by Evyatar Varman

Religions 2023, 14(1), 16; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14010016 - 22 Dec 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1062

Abstract

Martin Buber conceives human potential through the trope of pregnancy and birth. His portrayal of this phenomenon in I and Thou comprises a natural connection between mother and child during pregnancy and the potential for future, spiritual connections, articulated as I–Thou relations, which [...] Read more.

Martin Buber conceives human potential through the trope of pregnancy and birth. His portrayal of this phenomenon in I and Thou comprises a natural connection between mother and child during pregnancy and the potential for future, spiritual connections, articulated as I–Thou relations, which the child may accordingly achieve with their surroundings. Analyzing this model reveals Buber’s literary-philosophical engagement with the works of Plato and Søren Kierkegaard, and illuminates his perspective on human abilities and limits. Moreover, the context of Plato and Kierkegaard elucidates the way Buber connects an inborn human yearning (Sehnsucht) for I–Thou relations to participation in the divine creation of the world. This connection between Sehnsucht and creation, between I–It and I–Thou relations, diminishes the gap between human and God, emphasizing the significant role divine creation plays in the I–It reality. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion and Modern Jewish Thought: Volume II)

10 pages, 210 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Jewish Death in Jewish Time: The Ontological Shift Required to Understand Torah Judaism’s Indigenous Approach to Historical Trauma and Historical Memory

by Matthew Mordecai Katz

Religions 2022, 13(12), 1144; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13121144 - 24 Nov 2022

Viewed by 1035

Abstract

Scholars regularly make the mistake of applying critical analysis to religious traditions without a sensibility that they are often describing one ontology through the lens of another. Just as cultural anthropology attempts to understand indigenous traditions by respecting their unique worldview and minimizing [...] Read more.

Scholars regularly make the mistake of applying critical analysis to religious traditions without a sensibility that they are often describing one ontology through the lens of another. Just as cultural anthropology attempts to understand indigenous traditions by respecting their unique worldview and minimizing the foreign a priori of the ethnographer, critical scholars of religion need to be mindful of this unconscious bias when studying religious communities from ‘outside’. The traditional Jewish experience of death, mourning and historical trauma is a case in point. As such, this essay considers the indigenous ontological a priori of Torah Judaism as contrasted with the a priori of ‘Enlightenment’ as understood by Foucault. It then applies this hermeneutic to ‘Jewish death in Jewish time’. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion and Modern Jewish Thought: Volume II)

19 pages, 1853 KiB

Open AccessArticle

From the Neue Gemeinschaft to Bar Kochba: The Jewish Communitas or the Idea of Jewish Politics as Mysticism

by Amir Engel

Religions 2022, 13(12), 1143; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13121143 - 24 Nov 2022

Viewed by 1990

Abstract

This essay uses both published and archival material to reconstruct the ideological and social contexts of Martin Buber’s 1909 address “Judaism and the Jews”. It suggests that Buber’s address became immensely influential because it equated mysticism and politics into one metaphor. Secondly, it [...] Read more.

This essay uses both published and archival material to reconstruct the ideological and social contexts of Martin Buber’s 1909 address “Judaism and the Jews”. It suggests that Buber’s address became immensely influential because it equated mysticism and politics into one metaphor. Secondly, it shows that Buber imported this idea from debates and discussions that took place almost a decade earlier in Berlin, among the bohemian circle known as the Neue Gemeinschaft (new community). Finally, the author hopes to show that the social context can be as crucial to understanding an idea as the ideological context. The question about the functions and potentials of the “community” so central to Buber and the Neue Gemeinschaft must be examined, this essay contends, not only conceptually but also as a lived reality. In order to get a glimpse of “the new community”, this essay reproduces archival material that testifies not only to what people thought but also what they did, who they were, and how they interacted. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion and Modern Jewish Thought: Volume II)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

27 pages, 359 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Judaism, Experience, and the Secularizing of Life: Revisiting Walter Benjamin’s Montage of Quotation

by Benjamin E. Sax

Religions 2022, 13(11), 1033; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13111033 - 28 Oct 2022

Viewed by 1363

Abstract

Most scholarship on the life and thought of Walter Benjamin does not seriously engage the phenomenon of religion or the philosophy of religion in his thought. While some scholarship considers Benjamin a German-Jewish thinker, placed in the company of luminaries such as Martin [...] Read more.

Most scholarship on the life and thought of Walter Benjamin does not seriously engage the phenomenon of religion or the philosophy of religion in his thought. While some scholarship considers Benjamin a German-Jewish thinker, placed in the company of luminaries such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem, most readers assume that Benjamin’s secular identity motivated most of his inquiries and critical thinking. However, focusing on a secular sensibility obscures important elements of religious traditions in Benjamin’s writings. In fact, Benjamin suggested that widely contemporary institutions like capitalism, art, and even at times science contained poignant traces of religion and religious thought. In this article, I examine these traces by revisiting his montage of quotation, which, I argue, is where we see the most salient aspects of the use of Judaism in Benjamin’s thought. His desire to secularize life was inexorably related to his interpretations of experience and of Judaism. I will argue that not only did Benjamin, in fact, use Jewish theological language and imagery through his montage of quotation, but also, he used this method to secularize contemporary theological-political-aesthetic paradigms. I will also argue that this method—primarily understood through his idiosyncratic use of Jewish imagery—is critical to the writing of history. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion and Modern Jewish Thought: Volume II)

24 pages, 366 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Pathologically Abnormal Situation: Le Cercle Gaston Crémieux and the [Im]Possibility of an Anti-National Jewishness

by Joel Howard Swanson

Religions 2022, 13(11), 1018; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13111018 - 26 Oct 2022

Viewed by 1198

Abstract

This paper examines the diasporist French Jewish political group, Le Cercle Gaston Crémieux, founded in 1967 “to promote a diasporic Jewish existence without subjugation to the synagogue or to Zionism”. In contrast to either an assimilationist model which demanded the acceptance of French [...] Read more.

This paper examines the diasporist French Jewish political group, Le Cercle Gaston Crémieux, founded in 1967 “to promote a diasporic Jewish existence without subjugation to the synagogue or to Zionism”. In contrast to either an assimilationist model which demanded the acceptance of French national identity in the public sphere, or a Zionist model of Jewish nationalism, the Cercle offered a model in which the state of exile and diaspora becomes constitutive of Jewish identity, positioned as an alternate mode of being-in-the-world defined against white Christian European nationalism. Yet to expose the historically constructed, socially contingent nature of European nationalisms that claim the status of organic and natural, the Cercle had to imagine a particular narrative of the historical construction of Jewishness, and this social constructionism conflicted with the almost ontological, metaphysical status they wanted to accord to Jewish exile and otherness. Thus the Cercle failed to imagine an anti-national model of Jewishness, but this failure sheds light on larger fault lines in the possibility of a Jewish politics. The paper concludes that the Cercle’s imaginal diasporic Jewishness tries to enable the articulation of other forms of minority identity, suggesting that this failure may nonetheless prove politically productive. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion and Modern Jewish Thought: Volume II)

16 pages, 279 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Alterity, Alacrity, and Excess: Continental Philosophical Interpretations of the Figure of Abraham According to Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion

by Miriam Feldmann Kaye

Religions 2022, 13(5), 438; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13050438 - 13 May 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1680

Abstract

I propose a new reading of a selection of continental philosophical interpretations of the nature of existentialism after the dialogical turn. This analysis will focus on the particular case study of the biblical character of Abraham as a case in point. Philosophical treatments [...] Read more.

I propose a new reading of a selection of continental philosophical interpretations of the nature of existentialism after the dialogical turn. This analysis will focus on the particular case study of the biblical character of Abraham as a case in point. Philosophical treatments thereof allow for a consideration of different but connected approaches through the study and re-readings of the character of Abraham, which begin with Kierkegaard’s well-known rendition of the sacrifice of Isaac. This study will focus on interpretations since Kierkegaard, with attention to the continental philosophical trend. The four thinkers I bring, all offered critiques, and even rejections of, a purely existential position. These positions are well-known in the field. However, Existentialism is never actually overcome despite these four critiques of Kierkegaard’s model of Abraham. I will demonstrate this through an analysis of the case of interpretations of the biblical figure of Abraham, showing the ways in which Kierkegaard remains present in dialogical philosophy and even deconstructionism. For Franz Rosenzweig, his stance is relational and thus is fascinated yet ambivalent towards the readiness of Abraham to sacrifice; Emmanuel Levinas admires Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the subject/ivity (Proper Names and Difficult Freedom); Jacques Derrida admires Abraham’s passion (Gift of Death and Abraham as Other); and for Jean-Luc Marion, Abraham’s sacrifice does not present a relinquishing of self, but rather, the phenomenological act symbolises returning a Gift. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion and Modern Jewish Thought: Volume II)

Journal Menu

Journal Browser

Religion and Modern Jewish Thought: Volume II

Share This Special Issue

Special Issue Editor

Special Issue Information

Keywords

Related Special Issue

Published Papers (8 papers)

Research

Further Information

Guidelines

MDPI Initiatives

Follow MDPI