Nietzsche and Jewish Political Theology 9781138360105, 9780429433313

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Introduction: religious heretics – six characters in search of God
Part I Fin de siècle Hebrew Nietzscheanism
1 “It would be a good thing if the God of Zarathustra were the God of Israel”
2 Bereavement, breakdown, and the great heresy
Part II Nietzschean religious Jews
3 A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka
4 Zarathustra faces Mount Sinai
Part III The resurrection of myth
5 “It came over me like a revelation”
6 Zarathustra or Messiah?
Part IV Nietzsche in the Holy Land
7 The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit
8 Hebrew Hellenism
Summary
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Nietzsche and Jewish Political Theology

Nietzsche and Jewish Political Theology is the first book to explore the impact of Friedrich Nietzsche’s work on the formation of Jewish political theology during the first half of the twentieth century. It maps the many ways in which early Jewish thinkers grappled with Nietzsche’s powerful ideas about politics, morality, and religion in the process of forging a new and modern Jewish culture. The book explores the stories of some of the most important Jewish thinkers who utilized Nietzsche’s writings in crafting the intellectual foundations of Jewish modern political theology. These figures’ political convictions ranged from orthodox conservatism to pacifist anarchism, and their attitude towards Nietzsche’s ideas varied from enthusiastic embrace to ambivalence and outright rejection. By bringing these diverse figures together, the book makes a convincing argument about Nietzsche’s importance for key figures of early Zionism and modern Jewish political thought. The present study offers a new interpretation of a particular theological position which is called “heretical religiosity”. Only with modernity and, paradoxically, with rapid secularization, did one find “heretical religiosity” at full strength. Nietzsche enabled intellectual Jews to transform the foundation of their political existence. It provides a new perspective on the adaptation of Nietzsche’s philosophy in the age of Jewish national politics, and at the same time is a case study in the intellectual history of the modern Jewry. This new reading on Nietzsche’s work is a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in philosophy, Jewish history, and political theology. David Ohana is a full professor of History at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He is a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute, where he founded and directed the Forum for Mediterranean Cultures. His affiliations have included the Sorbonne, Harvard, Berkeley, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Routledge Jewish Studies Series Series Editor: Oliver Leaman University of Kentucky

Jewish Studies, which are interpreted to cover the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, culture, politics, philosophy, theology, religion, as they relate to Jewish affairs. The remit includes texts which have as their primary focus issues, ideas, personalities and events of relevance to Jews, Jewish life and the concepts which have characterized Jewish culture both in the past and today. The series is interested in receiving appropriate scripts or proposals. For a full list of titles in the series: www.routledge.com/middleeaststudies/series/ JEWISH Religious Studies and Rabbinics A Conversation Edited by Elizabeth Shanks Alexander and Beth A. Berkowitz Jewish Religious and Philosophical Ethics Edited by Curtis Hutt, Halla Kim and Berel Dov Lerner The Bible and the ‘Holy Poor’ From the Tanakh to Les Misérables David Aberbach Violence and Messianism Jewish Philosophy and the Great Conflicts of the Twentieth Century Petar Bojanić Ethical Monotheism The Philosophy of Judaism Ehud Benor Nationalism, War and Jewish Education From the Roman Empire to Modern Times David Aberbach Nietzsche and Jewish Political Theology David Ohana

Nietzsche and Jewish Political Theology David Ohana

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 David Ohana The right of David Ohana to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-36010-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43331-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents



Introduction: religious heretics – six characters in search of God

PART I

1

Fin de siècle Hebrew Nietzscheanism

29

1 “It would be a good thing if the God of Zarathustra were the God of Israel”

31

2 Bereavement, breakdown, and the great heresy

41

PART II

Nietzschean religious Jews

49

3 A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka

51

4 Zarathustra faces Mount Sinai

87

PART III

The resurrection of myth

109

5 “It came over me like a revelation”

111

6 Zarathustra or Messiah?

156

PART IV

Nietzsche in the Holy Land

219

7 The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit

221

8 Hebrew Hellenism

251



Summary

278

Bibliography Index

280 299

Introduction Religious heretics – six characters in search of God

The Nietzschean revolution which engulfed the intellectual, cultural, and political life of Europe began in the year in which its initiator died, the year in which the twentieth century was born. That century was in many ways an echo-chamber of some of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical ideas, which were elaborated, internalized, distorted, and transfigured in a thousand ways. They served as an anvil on which concepts were forged and adopted by both revolutionary and conservative ideological, mythological, national, and political theologies, and as a laboratory in which a new man was formed who tried out the tools of a transfiguration of bourgeois, Christian and rationalist values.1 The reverberations of Nietzsche’s “philosophical hammer” did not pass over the culture of the Hebrew revival and the renewed political existence. The fascinating and complex interrelationship between Nietzsche and modern Jewish thought can be examined from three points of view: that of his attitude to historical Judaism as a religion, as well as a cultural phenomenon, and the place of Judaism in his thought as a whole and with regard to his genealogy of Western culture;2 that of the attraction to the philosopher, both during his lifetime and after his death, of Jewish thinkers and cultural critics from Georg Brandes to Walter Kaufmann, who discovered him, translated his works and disseminated his reputation as one of the thinkers of modernity and at the same time a sharp critic of its objectives3; and that of the relationship to Nietzsche of modern Jewish political theology. This study will focus on the third aspect – the modern Jewish political theology via six Jewish thinkers influenced by Nietzsche: the Hassidic author Hillel Zeitlin, the religious philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, the religious thinker and intellectual Martin Buber, the mysticism scholar Gershom Scholem, the literary critic Baruch Kurzweil, and the right-winged intellectual Israel Eldad. Emmanuel Ben-Gurion, the son of the writer and cultural critic Micha Josef Berdichevsky (1865–1921), described in his memoirs a visit his father made to Friedrich Nietzsche’s home in Weimar in 1898. This was nine years after the breakdown of the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and two years before his death. The account is deeply moving. Berdichevsky, known as the “Nietzschean Hebrew”, who was on the first floor, turned by Nietzsche’s sister into an archive, distinctly heard the footsteps of the philosopher pacing like a caged lion on the

2  Introduction floor above. A quarter of a century later, the son and his mother also visited the archive in Weimar, and Emanuel Ben-Gurion related: the old woman [Nietzsche’s sister] remembered her meeting with Berdichevsky twenty-five years earlier, and recalled a certain scene from a novel, The Leave Taker, which he had told her about. One of the characters (the hero of the novel or his friend), rejected the Torah, which he saw as the curse of his people, took hold of a Torah-scroll, stabbed it with a knife, and blood flowed from the parchment [. . .]. I can’t say any more. The manuscript has disappeared and was perhaps destroyed.4 It would seem that the stabbing of the Torah-scroll-which-bled symbolized to an extraordinary degree the revolt of the culture of the Hebrew revival against historical Judaism at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Berdichevsky’s “rebellion from within” was different from the rebellion of another Nietzschean Jew at that period, Otto Weininger, who took it to a nihilistic conclusion, seeking to negate his Jewishness by suicide. This conclusion was totally anti-Nietzschean, for the philosopher of the will to power affirmed existence as amor fati. Berdichevsky and Weininger are just two points of reference in a period of over a hundred years in which there were Jewish writers, thinkers, and cultural critics who needed the German philosopher in order to distill their critique of the historical culture of their people, a critique that engendered a revolt. Berdichevsky and the Tse’irim (The “Young Ones”), a group of Jewish followers of Nietzsche which included Yehoshua Tahon, Mordechai Ehrenpreis, Mordechai Zeev Braude, and Zvi Melter were the torchbearers of the culture of the Hebrew revival, rebelled against the school of thought of Ahad Ha-Am. These, and later Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, were to a large degree the intellectual foundation-stones of modern Jewish nationhood. Hillel Zeitlin and Franz Rosenzweig in Europe, and, later on, Baruch Kurzweil and Israel Eldad in Israel, proposed different and opposing paths, both with regard to the collective Jewish entity in modern times and to the creation of a new Jewish individual. Why choose these particular thinkers? First, all the chosen characters embody the Leitmotiv of “heretical religiosity”. Second, these thinkers represent the diversity and pluralism of Jewish modern thought, and do not necessarily typify an ideological movement – Zionist or cosmopolitical, right or left, religious or secular, orthodox or conservative, believing or atheist – but a variety of positions, trends and movements, some close to Hassidism like Zietlin and Buber, others to orthodoxy, such as Rosenzweig and Kurzweil, some not even religious but empathetic with the Jewish national heritage, like Scholem and Eldad. Third, these thinkers related to Nietzsche’s philosophy not by mere accident, but with a thorough and specific attention to key issues in his dictum. Some drew systematic attention to Nietzsche’s writings, others tackled more concrete issues. But all of them deal with Jewish thought – Brenner and Berdichevsky read Nietzsche as writers, Rosenzweig as a philosopher, Zeitlin and Buber as theologians, Scholem as a historian, Kurzweil as a literary critic, and Ahad Ha-Am and Eldad as ideological

Introduction  3 intellectuals. We will not discuss thinkers who were influenced by Nietzsche but did not deal with Jewish thought per se, such as Shaul Tchernichovsky or Jonathan Ratosh. All the chosen characters contain Leitmotiv of “heretical religiosity”. The present study, offering a new phenomenological interpretation of a particular theological position, which I call “heretical religiosity”, is a case study in the intellectual history of the modern Jews. Many Jews, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the first half of the twentieth century, adapted themselves to modernity, meaning the Promethean passion to form themselves by themselves, to create a new Jewish individual and a national consciousness similar to that of other European peoples. In this respect, “heretical religiosity” embodied a dual and perhaps conflicting passion: to take part in history and share normative beliefs and at the same time to rebel against them and harness this rebellion to modernity. Although one can find precedents for this phenomenon in the history of ideas and in the history of religions before modern times, it is only with modernity and, paradoxically, with the advent of rapid secularization, that one finds “heretical religiosity” at full strength. The starting-point was the self-consciousness of the death of God which developed increasingly from the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century, the period in which the philosophical criticism and religious skepticism of the “young Hegelians” penetrated intellectual circles. The phenomenon reached its climax, however, with Nietzsche and his declaration that “God is dead”. Parallel with the widespread belief that the liquidation of the concept “God” was the official birth of secularismm, this study suggests another possibility, different from the “religious” and “secular” positions. Observing the methodological distinction between “influence” and “affinity”, I  will examine six thinkers influenced by Nietzsche, whose thought ran parallel with Nietzsche’s in that one can identify verifiable fingerprints and a direct connection to his name and principal ideas. I will not deal with affinity, as, for example, in the cases of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hakohen Kook, the poet Yonatan Ratosh, and the philosopher Yeshiyahu Leibowitz, who related to Nietzschean concepts without a reference and without quotations.5 I  will likewise not deal with universalist Jewish thinkers who held a dialogue with Nietzsche’s teachings, such as Hans Jonas, Hannah Arendt, or Emmanuel Levinas,6 but only with Jewish thinkers connected to the culture of the Hebrew revival and the Zionist movement (Rosenzweig is a special case). A study dealing with the influence of Nietzschean thought on Jewish modernity has of necessity to address the question of Nietzsche’s special relationship to the Jewish people and the Jews. Many scholars have dealt with this subject, and here I will briefly mention just a few of them: Michael Duffy and Willard Mittelman, who made a biographical survey of Nietzsche’s gradual detachment from the antisemitic orientation of his early writings (1989);7 Weaver Santaniello, who thought that Nietzsche’s main preoccupation in the history of nihilism was secular and Christian antisemitism and not Christianity or Judaism (1994);8 Yirmiyahu Yovel, who made a distinction between Nietzsche’s admiring attitude towards early Judaism and exilic Judaism, and his critical attitude to priestly Judaism (1996);9 and

4  Introduction Menahem Brinker, who had difficulty in exonerating Nietzsche from the charge of adopting traditional antisemitic positions and perceived an ambiguity in the Nietzschean philosophy (1999).10 In addition to these, there is a long drawn-out controversy among philosophers and historians about Nietzsche, Judaism, antisemitism and the relationship between them.11 Unlike most commentators, I claim that Nietzsche’s attitude to Judaism was not a side issue or a link in his argument anticipating and explaining Christianity, but a consistent and consecutive position and a central axis on which and within which the Nietzschean critique of morality and decadence was made. Jewish monotheism, which gave birth to the universal principle of human equality, was at the center of the attack of Nietzschean philosophy. Against the Judeo-Christian morality, Nietzsche set the will to power, and against the equality of man-made in God’s image, he set the ideal of the Übermensch.12 The question of Nietzsche’s attitude to Judaism is not central to this study. But, at the same time, two intriguing questions continue to be at the heart of the matter. The first one: is there a parallel between Nietzsche’s attitude to the Jews and the Jews’ attitude to him? The second one: is there a parallel between Nietzsche’s affinity with antisemitism and the adoption of his teachings by National Socialism? These two questions preoccupy many scholars, and the discussion of them changes with the mood of the time, beginning with the first generation of the twentieth century when the Nietzschean explosives were first revealed, continuing in the period between the two World Wars when Nietzsche was put in the service of antisemitic commentary and Nazi propaganda, in the post-war period in which he was portrayed first as a harbinger of Fascism, and later from the 1950s and ’60s, was identified with existentialism, very much due to his translation into English and dissemination in the Anglo-Saxon world thanks to Walter Kaufmann.13 This development may equally be considered a project of de-Nazification. It would seem that now there is already no need for Kaufmann’s responses to the antisemitic statements of Nietzsche – who before, during and shortly after the war was considered the philosophical father of National Socialism – and one can analyze them in themselves and examine his complex attitude to Judaism and the Jews. The last phase in the attitude to Nietzsche was the post-modern bear-hug:14 now Nietzsche was not seen as a one-dimensional thinker, antisemitic or philosemitic, with regard to the Jews, but as a thinker, the attitude to whom depended on the ideological or philosophical positions of the various critics. With regard to this new interpretation, it would be interesting to examine his position towards Judaism, the Jewish people, and the Jews not as a neglected aspect of his teaching but as a necessary starting-point without which his critical philosophical undertaking cannot be understood. The multitudinous interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophical enterprise increase more and more. In this study, I  have sought to focus on a particular dimension that is not generally connected with the name of the philosopher of Zarathustra: the heretical-religious dimension both of Nietzsche and his Jewish interpreters. His heretical cry, “God is dead!”, whatever it means, did not put an end to the questions Nietzsche asked about the existence or meaning of God, the

Introduction 5 dimension of the sacred in the modern age and the religious basis in men’s lives.15 Nietzsche delved deeply into religious matters, and the proof of it is the pertinence of such statements of his as “How many new divinities are possible?”,16 or “Two thousand years have passed, and has there not been any new God?”17 His resurrection arouses the fear and horror of the madman in The Gay Science: “I seek God! [. . .] Has he gone on a voyage?” [GS 125], a theme that recurs four years later in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of this, that God is dead!” [Z, Prologue, 2]. Zarathustra’s declaration is made at the start of a feverish search in which the possibility of God’s existence has not completely disappeared. On the contrary, there is the possibility of another divinity: “I love him who chastens his god because he loves his god: for he must perish of the wrath of god” [Z, Prologue, 4]. The religious heresy of Nietzsche, remote from the philosophical heresy of Voltaire or Sartre, was a source of attraction for many European thinkers and for Jewish thinkers of every stripe. It is tempting to think that Nietzsche’s radical criticism of the Christian theology and mentality drove many Jewish thinkers into the arms of the German philosopher, but one should remember that different thinkers had a variety of motivations. An initial pride in being counted among the followers of an audacious philosophical avant-garde like that proposed by Nietzsche – with its modern vision of a “new man”, its revolt against history, and its transvaluation of values – was exchanged for reservation and recoiling in the period between the two World Wars: that of the crisis of Nazi totalitarianism, the promotion of German folkishness, and an insurgence of antisemitism. However, despite this latter attitude, and earlier on, there were Jewish thinkers and critics who discovered him for the first time: the Danish savant Georg Brandes (Morris Cohen), who wrote and disseminated the first study of Nietzsche and gave public lectures on him in Copenhagen already in 1888; Sigmund Freud, who was not ashamed to admit that he took some of his major ideas from Nietzsche, and never hid his admiration for him;;18 and the Russian philosopher and theologian Lev Shestov, who admired the two traditions in which he was raised, the Jewish and the Christian, wrote, “Nietzsche showed us the way. We must search for something higher than compassion, higher than goodness: we must search for God”.19 After the Second World War, when a dark cloud overshadowed his reputation, there were the Jewish thinkers Karl Löwith and Walter Kaufmann who, before the appearance of Heidegger’s two volumes on Nietzsche, defended his reputation and refuted the idea that he was a Fascist ideologist.20 Well-known Jewish thinkers like Jacques Derrida and other lesser-known ones betrayed a sympathy with him and contributed to a positive valuation of his works. Even more paradoxical was his acceptance among Christian thinkers, as he was known first and foremost for his hostility to Christianity. Many Christian theologians, thinkers, and savants were positively disposed to him, and they appreciated his contribution to the theology and philosophy of the twentieth century.21 To these I wish to add in my study six Jewish thinkers who conducted a lively and productive dialogue with Nietzsche, of whom Martin Heidegger said, “He was the last German philosopher to search for God with

6  Introduction passion”.22 Lou Salomé, Nietzsche’s friend and beloved muse, herself a person thirsty for knowledge and wisdom, was one of the first to recognize the religious element as a central basis of his philosophizing, which moved uneasily between “a longing for God and a compulsive desire to reject him”.23 The six thinkers discussed in this study – Zeitlin, Rosenzweig, Buber, Scholem, Kurzweil, and Eldad – had different degrees of “heretical religion”. The “Nietzschean revolution” held a central place in the crystallization of their religious and national outlooks. Zeitlin, Rosenzweig, and Kurzweil in the final analysis remained faithful to the Jewish religion in the sense that Georg Simmel gave to the concept “religion”  – the institutionalized structure of a system of belief with its institutions and ordinances; Buber and Scholem fall under the heading of Simmel’s concept of “religiosity” with its broad horizons and variety of possibilities without a formal structure; Eldad thought in a sphere beyond “religion” and “religiosity” and saw himself as a “national” Jew sustained by the national traditions of his people. At the same time, the common feature of these figures (except for Kurzweil, who was Orthodox) was their non-religious religiosity: a state of mind between an attitude of denial, skepticism, and astonishment that undermined the foundations of the Jewish faith and the institutions of the Jewish religion, and an imminent longing, a yearning for the presence of God. Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942) was one of the Jewish thinkers, writers, and cultural critics who thought and wrote in the period following the pogroms of 1881. These people were self-taught, eclectic, and unsystematic, “reproductive intellectuals”, to use the expression of Edward Shils, and they read Nietzsche in Russian, Yiddish, and German in Russia at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The cunning of history mocked Hillel Zeitlin. The Jewish thinker, writer of the first Hebrew monograph on Friedrich Nietzsche, creator of the Übermensch, was taken to the crematory ovens built by the countrymen of that German philosopher, whose nation regarded the Jew as an “Untermensch”. The essay Friedrich Nietzsche, His Life, Poetry and Philosophy (1905) by Zeitlin was the longest monograph on Nietzsche in Hebrew since David Neumark published the first Hebrew article on Nietzsche in 1894. The monograph, which was published over ten months in 1905 in Ha-Zman – Journal of Life, Literature, Art and Science, did not provide the Hebrew reader with information on Nietzsche’s teachings as Neumark’s short article did, but was an expression of Zeitlin’s careful study of the philosopher’s personality. Zeitlin wrote several of his major essays at different periods of his life on the German master and saw an interconnection between Nietzsche’s life and thought. Did he conceive of an interconnection between his own thought and his life with its tragic ending? The Jewish Hassid who grazed in foreign fields from Spinoza to Nietzsche, who was equally true to his faith and his skepticism and who spoke of “Nietzsche the lover, the dreamer, the visionary, the poet, the saint, the recluse”,24 was a fascinating case of “heretical religiosity”. In his life and death, he embodied the road accident at the intersection where Jewish thought was exposed to Nietzsche’s philosophy. There were other encounters, more productive or positive, but the encounter between Nietzcheanism and Zeitlin was pregnant with a special destiny.

Introduction  7 Zeitlin’s diary for the months May–June 1917 contained shocking descriptions of the fate of Polish Jewry and recorded the dreams of thousands of Jews, including children, transported by trains to unknown destinations.25 Zeitlin could not conceive that his visions of the First World War would take on flesh and blood a quarter of a century later and would also involve his own life. In September 1942, 200,000 Jews had already been taken from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka. In the ghetto hospital, Dr. Mordechai Lansky wondered if sanctity could be ascribed to the Jews taken away to be exterminated. From his sickbed, Zeitlin, basing himself on Maimonides, answered, “In a case where a Jew is found killed by the wayside, he can be ascribed sanctity as he was killed on account of his Jewishness”.26 On the next day, the 6th of September, on the first evening of the New Year, the order was given that all the Jews had to leave their homes and go to the Umschlagplatz (collection point). A few nurses and a woman doctor accompanied the transports, which included a thousand sick people. Among them was Zeitlin, called “the last Messianic visionary in the crown of Jewry, the land of Poland”,27 wrapped in a prayer-shawl and phylacteries, and in his hands was the Book of the Zohar, which had replaced Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Nietzschean Hassid on his way to the crematoria took part in the realization of the prophecy of his former German master in Daybreak: “Among the spectacles to which the next century invites us is the decision on the fate of the European Jews”.28 Hillel Zeitlin was born in 1871 in Korma in White Russia, a small town, most of whose inhabitants were Hassidism or members of Habad. The young Hillel, who was considered an illuy (genius), was on his mother’s side exposed to Hassidism and on his father’s side to the tradition of the mitnagdim.29 At the time of his BarMitzvah, he experienced a religious awakening, but his interest in Haskalah literature drew him away from his Hassidic origins. As a teacher in the Jewish shtetls and villages, he gained a first-hand knowledge of the difficult conditions of life there, an acquaintance that gave him an empathy with the distress of his brethren as compared with the attitudes of the Zionist activists or the Hebrew intellectuals. Zeitlin taught himself Jewish and general philosophy, especially Schopenhauer, Spinoza, and the Russian Nietzscheans, and some science and aesthetics. As a result of his self-education and intellectual curiosity, he wrote an article, “Limmud ha-adam” (Man’s Study), that was rejected by Ahad Ha-Am. As a response to the religious and secular identity crisis, Ahad Ha-Am offered a “spiritual Zionism” that would solve the identity crisis into which the Jewish people had fallen. Israel would serve as a “spiritual center” and as a national solution to the Jewish diaspora. In his opinion, the Jewish culture created the Jewish religion, and thus its possible renewal would be a cultural movement. Ahad Ha-Am held that the unification of the Jewish people in the modern era would be possible only on the basis of “intellectual/spiritual life”. As a replacement, in 1898–1899, he published his reflections on the roots of good and evil in the cultures of the nations and in Jewish history, with a concluding section on Nietzsche  – his first essay on the writer of Zarathustra.30 After a short stay in Warsaw, he settled in Homel, where he joined the “Nietzsche circle”, a group of friends of Sender Baum that included Joseph Chaim Brenner,

8  Introduction Yaacov Fishman, and Uri Nissan Gnessin.31 Rebellious and pessimistic, they concerned themselves with the intractable questions of human existence, despised the bourgeois way of life, opposed the influence of Ahad Ha-Am, and absorbed the current discourse on Nietzsche and Tolstoy. In 1901, Zeitlin was elected the Homel delegate to the fifth Zionist Congress. He abandoned Herzl, however, and joined the Territorialists because of his concern for the situation of the Russian Jews oppressed by the pogroms. His acquaintance with David Frishman, the first translator of Thus Spoke Zarathustra into Hebrew, resulted in his publication in installments, in Ha-Zman, of his first major essay on Nietzsche, the first Hebrew monograph on the German philosopher.32 He lived in Vilna with his family until 1907, when he left for Warsaw, where his last essay on Nietzsche, Adam Elion O El Elion (The Übermensch or Overgod), was published in 1919.33 In his short autobiographical essay, The Story of My Life is a Short One (1928), Zeitlin declared with regard to Nietzsche’s heretical religiosity: “Beyond the outward heresy of Friedrich Nietzsche I became acquainted with the seeker of God on earth unto madness”.34 And to whom was this seemingly paradoxical revelation indebted? I am grateful that I know it through the most original Jew I have met in my life: Lev Shestov, from whom and from whose books I have learned that it is precisely out of the most intense mental tragedy that one comes to really know God.35 Zeitlin met Shestov in Vilna previous to 1908, the year in which he published his first essay on him in Brenner’s Ha-Me’orer. In this article, he expressed his great admiration for him: “If I  was asked who is the true heir of Friedrich Nietzsche, I would answer without hesitation: Lev Shestov”.36 37 Underlying the religious liminality of the philosopher and disciple, the “religious heretics”, there was a critique of man. In the process of clarification that he embarked on, Zeitlin made a critical re-examination of the positions of his teacher the philosopher. He wished to find the fixed kernel of Nietzsche’s thought and to disassemble and reassemble Nietzsche’s viewpoint and reveal the dynamic and contradictory elements it contained. A  reading of his last books, Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science showed in his opinion that parallel with Nietzsche’s consistent war against romanticism, metaphysics, and Schopenhaurian pessimism, they adopted a surprising position, a position open to all that was superhuman. Although the heretical philosopher still fought against metaphysical manifestations, one found in him a “spiritual closeness” to the thing he was fighting against. There was evidence in his thinking of deep and genuine spiritual needs, and “all that was in the beginning a war to destroy everything that was above humanity and construct in its place the building of humanity was now also for things that were above humanity”.38 Here we see Zeitlin’s sophisticated use of Nietzsche’s famous aphorism, “to build a temple you must destroy a temple”; the temple was not destroyed for the purpose of building another in its place, but in order to build a place for man. In the same way, Zeitlin called for the new temple to be destroyed, and in its place for the foundations to be laid of a

Introduction  9 transcendental temple, basing oneself on Nietzsche’s words: “Man is a thing that must overcome itself”.39 Zeitlin never called for God to be put to death, and when the idea became familiar, he did not see Zarathustra as a suitable replacement. His gaze was always fixed on the millions of suffering Jews and not on the intellectual elite that enthused over the figure of the Übermensch. In all the stages of his philosophical development he persisted in seeing in Nietzsche “beyond his outward heresy, a seeker of God unto madness”. Like the Hebrew Nietzscheans, he made a selective reading of Nietzsche, a reading that suited his way of thinking. A religious search and a reading of Nietzsche went hand in hand throughout his life. This assertion is in contradiction to the explanation that has so far been given of Zeitlin’s relationship to Nietzsche as a move from Nietzschean atheism to a return to religion, an explanation very much due to the corrective interpretations of his religious disciples and also to the misleading title which Zeitlin gave to his late article “Übermensch or Overgod” (1919). The case of Zeitlin illuminates the unique position he held midway between the secular Tze’irim and the religious thinkers in modern Jewish thought. Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) grew up in a different intellectual atmosphere. Unlike Zeitlin, the autodidact and Hassid from Russia, who derived his inspiration from Shestov, Rosenzweig received an academic education in Germany, starting with medical studies which he abandoned for the study of history and geography, at the end of which he wrote his doctoral thesis on “Hegel and the State”, but, like Zeitlin, he too struggled with his faith and he too was initially enthusiastic about Nietzsche. Where faith is concerned, the nihilistic philosopher of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the writer of The Star of Redemption seem to be on opposite sides. One denied the value of all values and revealed God’s ashes to modern man, and the other discovered at the end of the day that “God is light”.40 In 1913, when about to undergo baptism, Rosenzweig had a profound religious experience that finally prevented him from leaving Judaism. Following the conversion to Christianity of his friend and cousin Hans Ehrenberg and theological discussions with his friend the convert Eugen Rosenstock, Rosenzweig passed through a terrible crisis in 1913, which turned out post-factum to be the most difficult year of his life, the one where he decided whether to change his faith. He wished to convert to Christianity as a Jew and not as a pagan. The religious upheaval, a “collapse”, he experienced during a Yom Kippur service in Berlin, which recalls a similar religious experience which the Protestant theologian Rudolf Otto had during a Yom Kippur service in North Africa, finally tipped the scales. A letter to his mother on the 23rd of October 1913 ends as follows: “You will have gathered from this letter that I seem to have found the way back about which I had brooded in vain for almost three months”.41 Within a week, he declared to his cousin Rudolf Ehrenburg that he had renounced his decision to convert: “I am remaining a Jew”.42 Six years later, looking back, Rosezweig described the events of those days: The first day I came to Berlin, I experienced hope for the first time, and once and for all [. . .] I was involved in a struggle with God that I had never known

10  Introduction before. My whole life has been on this basis from that time onwards, including the Star, and it is not for nothing that it is called The Star of Redemption, for in the skies of the future it is situated in those same skies of hope. These words strongly recall the principle of hope enunciated by Ernst Bloch after the horrors of the First World War.43 Bloch wanted to make hope an ontological principle, a quality of being. He secularized the hope in God’s mercy found, for instance, in Gabriel Marcel’s Metaphysics of Hope, and believed it was realized in human actions.44 Rosenzweig raised hope to the sphere of revelation, making it a metaphysical principle which man could discover. In 1922, Rosenzweig spoke of those Days of Awe in Berlin when writing to his teacher Friedrich Meinecke, who invited him to join him in teaching at the University of Berlin: “In 1913 something happened to me for which collapse is the only fitting name. I suddenly found myself on a heap of wreckage, or rather I realised that the road I was then pursuing was flanked by unrealities”.45 The word “collapse” had a central significance in Rosenzweig’s philosophical-theological lexicon. In a letter of 1922, he explained in his special fashion what the “German essence” meant for him: LUTHER:  the German faith. BACH:  German art. GOETHE:  the German man. HEGEL:  the German spirit. COHEN, BISMARCK:  the German State. *, NIETZSCHE:  the German collapse.46

It is not surprising if Rosenzweig, who in those years displayed a special empathy for Nietzsche’s philosophical approach, paid him the honor of concluding his list with him and making him the ultimate characterization of the German essence, which is “collapse”. About a month later, Nietzsche received from Rosenzweig the greatest compliment ever paid to the German philosopher: Spinoza refuted Descartes, Leibniz refuted Spinoza, Kant refuted Leibniz, Fichte refuted Kant, Schelling refuted Fichte, Hegel refuted Schelling. Hegel was “not only refuted but found guilty by the historical process”, but Nietzsche did not refute Schopenhauer and I do not refute Nietzsche. Anyone who today still goes in for refutation (for example, Rickert with regard to Nietzsche, for what is the philosophy of values if not war against the transfiguration of values?) shows thereby that he is not a philosopher.47 Among all the great critics of Christianity and demolishers of its beliefs, Rosenzweig in 1918 singled out Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as “the first great apostates” of the Christian Church.48 About six years later, he hailed Nietzsche as the philosopher who ushered in the modern era with his revolutionary way of philosophizing: “It may be anti-Christian, but it has proved to be the beginning of the

Introduction  11 present age”.49 All this shows that Rosenzweig had great respect for Nietzsche and saw him as the greatest philosopher of modern times, but what did he think of the content of Nietzsche’s philosophy? He was chiefly concerned with Nietzsche’s approach, which was highly critical, his genealogy, which was revelatory to the point of nihilism, his call for a transvaluation of values, and his repudiation of Christianity. In short, he was concerned with the form, the approach, rather than the content. Only when he began to analyze the positive philosophy of Zarathustra was he aware of the depth of his critical relationship to Nietzscheanism. Zarathustra, for Rosenzweig, is not a person but an image, a figure, the embodiment of “the sinner”, in love with his own countenance and worshiping a sanctified subjectivism; but this self-sanctification is revealed as empty, meaningless, and lacking any real philosophical content. Zarathustra’s egoism seeks a refuge from idealism and retreats into privacy and his own existence. This man, who crowns himself the “lord of creation”, celebrates his freedom without the dimension of truth. It is a freedom bereft of freedom. The Übermensch, the product of the Nietzschean Zarathustra, is very far from being achieved because he has no real form, flesh, and blood, is not a real man but is a placard for childish fantasies. A real man is not himself but an overture and a “going under”, a sort of bridge that has to be crossed to what he ought to be. The meaning of the fact that man cannot become the Übermensch, says Richard Cohen, is that he is required to sacrifice himself to the Übermensch.50 He must take his distance from love of his neighbor and strive for what is beyond himself, for what has not yet been achieved. Unlike John the Baptist’s prophecy, which was followed by the coming of Jesus, Zarathustra’s prophecy remains unfulfilled. Zarathustra condemns himself to unfulfillment by preaching something impossible, inhuman. He bears witness that he is inhuman, or even anti-human. In smashing the tablets, he is revealed as a nihilistic prophet. Nietzsche flees from the love of man, the neighbor, the other, to a play of images. He retreats from philosophizing to reflection without a purpose, from criticism to paganism, from ideas to forms, from iconoclasm to the construction of idols. After the First World War, Rosenzweig thought of setting up an “academy for Jewish studies”, an idea that was also supported by Buber and Scholem.51 The Jewish academy that was established was the first stratum in the edifice of Jewish studies which later culminated in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1914, Buber asked Rosenzweig to write an article for the year book Vom Judentum, but the critical article on Buber that Rosenzweig wrote, entitled “Nihilist Theology”, was not accepted. In 1921, however, Rosenzweig visited Buber in Hoffenheim and invited him to teach in the “Free House of Jewish Learning” (Lehrhaus), which had just been founded in nearby Frankfurt. After the death of Rabbi Nehemiah Zvi Nobel, who had brought Rosenzweig closer to the ordinances of Judaism, and with the beginning of the paralysis that afflicted him, Rosenzweig begged Buber in a letter to “stay here for us, stay here for me!” The two thinkers became close friends, but while Rosenzweig grew closer to an observance of the commandments of Judaism, Buber grew further away. An expression of this and of the disagreement between them concerning halacha was to be found in Rosezweig’s

12  Introduction article “Builders”. Gershom Scholem, who also lectured in the “House of Jewish Learning” when he had finished writing his doctoral thesis, thought that the Lehrhaus was a model of the Jewish-German symbiosis which had never come to pass, and was a substitute for Aliyah to the Land of Israel. Kurzweil, like Rosenzweig, stressed the continuity of Judaism throughout the ages, and both rejected the revolutionary (or dialectical) demand for a Nietzschean transvaluation of values advocated by the school of Berdichevsky and Joseph Klatzkin. The collaboration between Rosenzweig and Buber reached its climax with their joint translation of the Bible into German, completed by Buber after Rosenzweig’s death following years of suffering from a degenerative muscular disease. A symbolic expression of the friendship between these two men is the yearly bestowal of a “BuberRosenzweig medal” in Germany. Martin Buber (1878–1965) related that when staying on the estate of his grandfather Rabbi Shlomo Buber at the age of 11 in 1889, the year Nietzsche lost his mind, he would sometimes slip away to the stables where he would stroke the neck of his favorite horse. This was not a casual pleasure for him, but, in his words, a “deeply stirring happening”. The horse let him come close to him and touch him. When he stroked its smooth-combed mane, the boy felt a tremendous vitality, something that was not I, that was not akin to me, palpably the other, not just another, really the Other itself: and yet it let me approach, confided itself to me, placed itself elementally in the relation of thou and thou to me.52 But one day, when he found the stroking very entertaining, something essential changed in the relationship between the boy and the horse. When he stroked the horse’s neck the next day it was not the same as before, and the horse did not raise its head. Much later, when he thought about it, Buber understood that the horse had felt betrayed. On leaving his room on the morning of the third of January 1889, Nietzsche saw a cabman beating his horse at the cab-station in the Piazza Carlo Alberto in the city of Turin.53 He cried out, crossed the piazza, and threw his arms around the horse’s neck. While gripping the horse, he lost consciousness and collapsed. A large crowd gathered. Nietzsche’s landlord, who happened to be passing, identified his tenant and arranged for him to be taken back to his room. The philosopher lay there unconscious for a long time. When he awoke, he was no longer himself. At first, he sang, shouted, and banged on the piano until the landlord had to call a doctor and threatened to call a policeman. After that, he calmed down and began to write the famous series of letters to the rulers of Europe and his friends, signing them “Dionysius” and “Jesus”. We have here two examples of a single phenomenon, two cases of a convergence between living beings, showing an empathy in which there is a great similarity, but at the same time, a chasm lies between them. One expressed a rupture leading to a breakdown and madness, a desperate last attempt to grasp at something alive, not a human caress of a friend or relative but the embrace of an alien

Introduction  13 creature who was beaten and who cried out in its pain. The embrace expressed great distress, but it was also a final gesture before taking leave of one’s sanity. Martin Buber’s embrace of the horse, on the other hand, was a manifestation of affection, a moment of touching and closeness between two beings, expressing mutual empathy, warmth, and tranquility – a kind of dialogue. However, when the mutual contact became the satisfaction of only one partner (the “interested interest”, as Kant would have said), there was an estrangement and the parties drew apart. One can make an obvious comparison between these two cases. One was an act of insanity, a nihilistic moment of a breakdown of life and values, and the other an expression of humanism. But one can also make a different comparison. Nietzsche’s embrace was unconditional, amor fati, an embrace to the point of madness, a total response to the crying of the horse, but in Buber’s case there was a recompense as there was mutual satisfaction. “The Horses” is a short Hassidic tale, not autobiographical like the previous story, related by Buber in his book The Hidden Light.54 Rabbi Sussia and Rabbi Elimelech put up from time to time in their travels in the house of a poor, Godfearing man in the town of Ludmir. Much later, when they had become famous, they returned to Ludmir, but this time they rode in a carriage. The rumor spread, and one of the wealthy people in the town came towards them and invited them to stay in his home. The rabbis said, We came on our own, and nothing has changed to justify giving us more consideration than before. The only change this time is the horses and carriage, so we shall leave them in the yard and stay in the house of our former host. Here is another aspect of the relationship between philosophers and horses. This time the horses were a status symbol, not an object of affection. Whatever the case, as mirrored by the horses, the German philosopher Nietzsche comes across as someone who drove himself to the limit and sentenced himself to break down and madness, and the Jewish philosopher Buber comes over as someone who advocated reformation and dialogue while warning against estrangement and mutual exploitation. One can also go back to Plato, who compared the human soul to two horses – one wild and the other noble.55 One can say that these two cases represent a realization of the thinking of the two philosophers. Nietzsche’s revaluation moved in a direction from affinity to sovereignty, from mutuality to independence, from the end to the path, from the achievement to the process. The wish for power was the main thing; the attainment of one’s goal was insipid. That was the Nietzschean revolution in the sphere of morality: ethics were part of the rhythm of the world. They were no longer something between man and his fellow man, but between man and his world (in terms of Judaism, between man and God). Now, ethics were not perceived in terms of the normative social criteria of good and evil but according to criteria of authenticity, a positive correlation between man and his world. But in Buber, the main thing is the affinity between man and his neighbor, between man and his creator. Subject and object cannot exist without each other, and their coexistence

14  Introduction is dependent on their mutual relationship. The “I” does not have a separate existence and the “Thou” does not have a separate existence. The affinity between “I” and “Thou” is a priori, previous to both.56 This being the case, what is the place of Nietzsche’s and Buber’s concepts of man in the philosophical tradition? In Kant, man is basically a being with a nonsocial sociability, which means that the individual needs to be conscious of his fellow man in order to confirm his own existence, and social relations are therefore necessary and integral to human nature. In Hegel, there is a dialectic of master and slave, a struggle of consciousnesses in which each one wants its freedom and in so doing overpowers the consciousness of its neighbor. Nietzsche revolted against the approach of the Enlightenment: with him, the principle of individuality replaced the social principle. For the man preoccupied with self-overcoming, the social principle is irrelevant, but Buber adopted the “social” Enlightenment approach. Yet Nietzsche and Buber both agree that the collective, which binds together weak individuals who find it difficult to exist in isolation, is liable to blur a man’s individuality and personality. Buber’s philosophical theology, as expressed in his most important work, I and Thou, is in total contradiction to Nietzsche’s philosophy as formulated in The Will to Power and his other works. Apart from the opposing philosophical content, it must be pointed out that Nietzsche was essentially a philologist, a philosopher, and a poet, while Buber was a philosopher, a theologian, a sociologist, and an intellectual who sought through his books and lectures to influence his reading public in national, political, and religious matters from a Jewish and Zionist point of view. Buber sought to disseminate his teachings by publishing books and articles, creating a group of followers, editing journals, and participating in political congresses. Unlike Nietzsche, who operated solely in the sphere of philosophy, Buber was active in four areas: philosophy, ideology, theology, and politics.57 Would it be correct to confirm once again the common assumption that Nietzsche was an atheist and Buber a believer? Nietzsche gave centrality to the “I” sovereign in its world, who created himself, who was self-sufficient, while Buber gave centrality to the relationship between man and his fellow and man and his Maker; Nietzsche revealed the manipulative structure of all ideologies and religions, while Buber was a Zionist in heart and soul and a religious person through and through. For Nietzsche, nationalism, socialism, and democracy were modern expressions of “slave morality”, while Buber saw Hebrew humanism, the morality of the prophets and the utopia of the kibbutz as objectives for which it was worth leaving the landscape of the European homeland. Yet, despite all these differences, the two thinkers were, each in his way and in his own sphere, “religious heretics”: anarchistic thinkers outside the schematic conceptual frameworks of “religion” and “secularism”. In Autobiographical Fragments, Buber, with great perspicacity, acknowledged his spiritual enslavement to his philosophical guru, as if he were possessed by him, as if he had lost his independence and his critical faculty, as if he were under a spell or had drunk an intoxicating brew that for a certain time had made him lose his liberty and peace of mind.58 This intoxication and his later disillusionment

Introduction  15 naturally recall Nietzsche’s relationships with Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner. It was only Nietzsche’s liberation from these two mentors and his overcoming of their personalities and teachings that made possible his own creative freedom and original thought. Nietzsche may have needed them in order to build himself up and arrive at the crystallization of his “self” and the concept of the transvaluation of values.59 In a similar way, the young Buber needed Nietzsche in order to overcome him after his own path had been established according to Nietzschean principles. In a footnote to Autobiographical Fragments, Buber said that when he read Zarathustra at the age of 17 and was entranced by it, he decided to translate it into Polish.60 He set to work, translated the first part, and when he was preparing to continue with the second part, a well-known Polish writer informed him that he had already begun to translate parts of the work, and he suggested to Buber that they should translate the book together. Buber deferred to the writer and abandoned his intention of completing the translation. As a schoolboy, he regularly brought Zarathustra to school and read it enthusiastically, like many of his generation in turn-of-the-century Europe. Vienna at the turn of the century was a European cultural center and the home of radical philosophical ideas, avant-garde movements in art, experimentation in music and the theater, and antisemitic manifestations. Nietzsche had the reputation of being a rebel against the bourgeoisie, a destroyer of conventional notions, a nihilistic prophet, and at the same time the founder of a new philosophical religion.61 His daring proclamation of the death of God was a breath of fresh air for many young people who were attracted by the revolution in philosophy taking place in their time. The main feature of this revolution was the shift from the concepts of good and evil, truth and falsehood – which were seen as the false values of a decadent culture about to die – to the aesthetic values of creativity, vitality, and heroism, which were inspired by a re-examination of the works of classical culture. Echoes of the Nietzschean revolution found their way into the political ideas of the left and right, feminist manifestos, religious platforms, and an unrestrained intellectual atmosphere that gave free play to any new idea. Zarathustra was the symbol of the intellectual revolution Nietzsche brought about, a revolution whose main gospel was the shift from ethics to aesthetics. The “new man”, the crowning glory of the Nietzschean revolution, of whom Zarathustra was the mentor and proclaimer, was the representative of a live, individualistic, and creative civilization, trampling underfoot the shibboleths of yesterday’s culture: the slave morality, the values of a sick condition, the illusion of progress, the cult of asceticism, the preaching of equality, and the belief in a religious or ideological world-to-come. This was the radical atmosphere Buber knew in Vienna at the time he wrote “Zarathustra”. The short article “Zarathustra” appears to have been written between the years 1898 to 1900. Paul Mendes-Flohr pointed out, after a careful examination, that Buber treated Nietzsche in the article as someone who was still alive (he passed away in 1900).62 Moreover, the psychological aspect is stressed in the article, evidence of the years Buber sat on the benches of the University of Vienna as

16  Introduction a student of psychology. After reading The Birth of Tragedy, his first encounter with Nietzsche, the Jewish youth saw the German philosopher as a modern, antibourgeois thinker and a restless romantic. Nietzsche’s early adulation of Wagner helped to make Buber a Wagnerian, but when he felt that Nietzsche was guilty of inconsistency, he stopped reading him. Only when he read Zarathustra again did he discover the myth of eternal recurrence. This time, he no longer regarded Nietzsche as someone with a consistent doctrine but accepted him as the spokesman of a critical and skeptical point of view, and as a thinker who gave him inspiration in developing “mythical hermeneutics”.63 Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem (1887–1982) were parallel in their researches into Hassidism and Kabbala, two modern attempts to instill “soul” into rabbinic Judaism through a revival of myth. Scholem’s informative statement about the turning-point represented by Buber’s positive attitude to myth which, he said, “was due to the influence of Nietzsche”, could also be applied to himself.64 Scholem also ascribed Nietzsche a central position in the re-evaluation of myth. Here it is interesting to note that Scholem, together with the scholar of religions Mircea Eliade, the scholar of Islam Henry Corbin and the psychologist Carl Jung, participated in the “Eranos circle”, which stressed the centrality of myth for an understanding of religious and cultural phenomena.65 On the 23rd of July 1918, Gershom Scholem, who was then a Berlin student making his first steps in wrestling with his Jewish identity, wrote in his diary, “Sometimes I start to think that Friedrich Nietzsche is the only one in modern times who has said anything substantial about ethics”.66 This “substantial thing”, which the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra introduced into the sphere of morality was of course the Nietzschean revolution of the shift from ethics to aesthetics, the transvaluation of values, and the new criteria of the will to power and decadence, which are beyond good and evil. These heretical philosophical views concerning the Judeo-Christian morality and the ideology of the German bourgeoisie (the young Scholem rebelled against his father, who represented the liberal lifestyle and bourgeois mentality of the assimilated Jew) left their imprint on the Jewish thinker at the beginning of his scholarly career. And indeed, his first Hebrew article, Mitzva ha-baa be-avera (Redemption Through Sin), published in Palestine in 1937, discussed what was described as the “nihilistic revolution” of the Sabbataeans and Frankists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, whose main feature was the rejection of the normative ethics of rabbinic Judaism.67 Alexander Kraushar, the author of the book Frank: Frankiści Polsky, 1726– 1816 (1895), compared Divrei ha-adon (Words of the Lord), a hagiography of Jacob Frank written by his followers and considered the “credo” of the Frankist unbelievers, to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: When we examined the content of these strange little entries, we were reminded of the new German philosopher Nietzsche and his famous book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for they too are written beautifully and strangely and with brevity, and if we can find our way among the meanderings of the

Introduction  17 spiritual paths represented in these chapters, we will be able to form a mental picture of all that Frank did.68 The comparison made by the Polish historian between Jacob Frank and Friedrich Nietzsche is instructive both in itself and with regard to Scholem’s affinity to Nietzsche and his dealings with Frank, two figures who sought to bring about a revolution in the sphere of morals. The parallel between Frank and Nietzsche demonstrates more than any number of witnesses the degree to which the influence of the philosopher of the “nihilistic revolution” affected the greatest scholar of Judaism in the twentieth century. Frank and Nietzsche consciously despised and rejected the moral norms of bourgeois culture and called for a reversal and transvaluation of values. This call was heeded by an isolated sect of eighteenthcentury Jewry on the one hand and major intellectual currents at the beginning of the twentieth century on the other, penetrated deeply and was dialectically expressed in various forms of heresy, secularism, radicalism and revolutionism. These long-drawn-out processes shook things to the core, changed the existing intellectual climate, and accelerated the modernizing sociological tendencies of various strata both among the Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and among philosophers, ideologists, political activists, theologians, and educationalists in Europe. It is interesting to note in this connection that one of Scholem’s first articles in Hebrew and the most important was devoted to a discussion of the Frankist and Sabbetaian phenomenon and the revolution of consciousness that took place in enlightened circles of European Jewry, circles that sought an explanation for the heretical religiosity of Frank and his sect and also for their own heretical religiosity.69 In Scholem’s opinion, this theological antinomianism led to a reflective self-consciousness among major Jewish figures, to currents of enlightenment and to a European and Zionist revolutionism. Scholem himself, when he was 17 years old, wrote in his diary on the 17th of November 1914, “And what’s so wonderful about Zarathustra? [. . .] Zarathustra is in fact a new Bible, regardless of what one thinks about the ideas it propounds. To write something like it is my ideal”.70 It is therefore not surprising if the editor of the English edition of Scholem’s diaries called the preface he wrote “A  Zarathustra for the Jews”.71 Other Scholem scholars followed suit and connected together the Jewish thinker, the German philosopher, and the work with the name of the Persian god. The dream of the young Scholem was not so far from the reality, and it may have taken on flesh and blood in his great book Sabbatai Sevi (1957), an exemplary work that is an aesthetic retelling of the Sabbetaian revolt. But one may go further and say that the Nietzschean revolution against the Judeo-Christian morality was already exemplified as an aesthetic phenomenon in the article “Redemption through Sin” written 20  years before the biography of the seventeenth-century false Messiah. Consequently, a re-examination of the early article and the biography, and reading them as “A Zarathustra for the Jews” is by no means unreasonable, and it may even provide refreshing insights into the development of Scholem’s ideas and an opportunity to challenge him through an analogical perspective.72

18  Introduction In which way did the Nietzschean influence affect the young Scholem, or the older one, for that matter? Was it a youthful phase, a need for a ladder (in the same way as Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber and Hillel Zeitlin needed one, for instance), a necessary stairway in the process of self-construction (Bildung), or was it a case of an inner affinity with matters which Scholem was concerned with all his life, such as nihilism, self-overcoming, normative morality, and the will to power? These matters preoccupied the young Scholem and gave him the spiritual strength to do great things, to be a “superman” laying with his own hands his life’s path and urging him to be a Messiah to his people. Scholem aspired to a life of greatness and creativity, and intended to write his masterpiece, or another great work, or both, which would give him his place among other great modern thinkers like himself. Scholem’s Zionism is shown here to be existentialist rather than political. It demands of the Jews, as of himself, self-overcoming and the transvaluation of the bourgeois values of exilic Judaism. His model is Zarathustra; his anarchic call for a “revolution everywhere” also applies to his own camp. Zionism must break open the boundaries of exile. His approach was a Jewish interpretation of the European crisis, and the radical answer to it was Zion, which represented “the equilibrium of all things”, “the solution to all incompleteness”. For him, Zionism was “the need for a splendid life in Palestine”. Benjamin Lazier has suggested that the change of names from Gerhardt to Gershom and from Scholem to Shalom was an example of the Nietzschean principle of self-overcoming and of the conscious creation of the “self”.73 Out of all the works one can think of, Scholem chose Nietzsche’s early essays, Untimely Meditations (not the works generally considered most important), as ideal models of praise of the Bible – a clear sign of Scholem’s respectful attitude to Nietzsche. At the beginning of Scholem’s career as a historian, when he was making his first steps as a researcher of Kabbala, conservative approaches were common in Germany, as were nationalist outlooks in German universities.74 History was the jewel in the crown of the national myth, and Treitschke was its spokesman. Just as he rejected the possibility of the universality of mysticism, Scholem rejected the possibility that his Jewish nationalism bore any resemblance to German nationalism. Scholem was disgusted at the patriotic euphoria of the Germans, including many Jews (for example, Buber and Zimmel), at the time of the First World War; he despised the bourgeois way of life and left his father’s home; he enthusiastically aligned himself with cultural Zionism and denied the possibility of a ­Jewish-German symbiosis. He did, however, acknowledge the philosophical heritage that the Jews received from the Germans, though not his debt to Nietzsche in Germany.75 The abundant examples of the affinity of the young Jewish scholar to the German philosopher sprang up in purely German soil. Later on, I  shall consider whether these affinities were shifting or accidental. If that is so, Scholem’s later disavowal of Nietzsche and his insistence on stressing his alienation from the harmful influence of the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra are most surprising. Here are two typical examples of Scholem’s reactions. In May 1975, he told the

Introduction  19 American-Jewish scholar of Hebrew literature Robert Alter about the fine review published in Commentary of the English translation of Sabbatai Sevi, but to Nietzsche, I must confess that I feel no kinship to him or to his heritage, and as a young man I turned away in disgust from those writings of Nietzsche which came into my hands. Unfortunately, those seem to have been the wrong ones, like Zarathustra, and they prevented me from delving deeper.76 Again, in March 1978, Scholem reacted angrily to a critical article by Henry Pachter: “Gershom Scholem: The Myth of the Myth-Maker”. Scholem called it “a very strange essay full of the most nonsensical assertions about me”, and he explained, What I  found particularly amusing was the discovery that I  derive from Nietzsche and that my work ‘obviously’ stands under the influence of The Birth of Tragedy, a work that I have never read, as I have hardly read Nietzsche at all, apart from Zarathustra, which particularly repelled me.77 Once in Palestine, Scholem abandoned his preoccupation with the Messianic aspect of the war and the revolution in Europe in favor of his researches into the Kabbala and involvement in the new problems that arose in the Middle East. In the first years of his immigration, there was a change in his understanding of the concepts “anarchism” and “nihilism”, and he gave them new meanings. In his late article “Nihilism as a Religious Phenomenon” (1974), the result of a lecture to the Eranos circle, he described nihilism differently from the way he had done previously: the nihilist was now seen as a revolutionary, “a sworn opponent to every kind of authority, who is unable to accept principles of belief if they are not linked to the basic intention of the principles”.78 In the chapter on Gershom Scholem, I shall discuss the nihilist-messianic syndrome, which in his opinion explains Sabbetaianism and Frankism as leading to Zionism as a secular phenomenon. Baruch Kurzweil (1907–1972) directed his criticism against the political theology of secular Zionism. His criticism of Berdichevsky and the culture of the Hebrew revival is linked by an internal logic to his criticism of Gershom Scholem and the Science of Judaism. As he said, “Already for a long time I have claimed that many of Scholem’s historical judgements are to be found in a less systematic form in the writings of Berdichevsky”.79 Common to both of them, in his opinion, was an anti-rabbinic orientation, an attack on what Scholem called “the rigid monotheism of law, of halacha” which he believed normative, anti-mythical Judaism had produced. According to Kurzweil, the modernistic Jewish orientation of the school of Berdichevsky and Scholem had a Nietzschean slant, an existential approach focused on myth rather than law, on perspectivism rather than a meta-narrative: Berdichevsky followed the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Judaic studies), and in a dangerous way set the concept “life” in its Nietzschean sense in

20  Introduction opposition to Judaism. After Berdichevsky, the tendency continued with Saul Tchernikovsky, Zalman Shneur and Haim Hazzaz, and fixed the direction of our modern literature. Gershom Scholem was the chief person to express it through the scientific-historical method.80 Kurzweil saw a direct line of affinity to Nietzsche stretching from the early Canaanism of Berdichevsky and the Tse’irim to the mythical and nihilistic Judaism of Gershom Scholem, and, finally, the secular nationalism of Ben-Gurion and the “Canaanite Messianism” that came into being with the conquest of the territories in the Six-Day War (1967). According to Kurzweil, the Nietzschean “philosophy of life” (Lebensphilosophie) was the basis of the aesthetic revolution of the culture of the Hebrew revival at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The secular character of the Hebrew literary revolution was inherent in its closeness to the European intellectual climate and especially to German thought, “one of whose tendencies reached the peak of its development in the teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche”.81 In the genealogy he drew up when locating the origins of secular criticism in the works of Berdichevsky, Brenner, Shneur, and Hazzaz, Kurzweil did not take the whole of Nietzsche’s thought into account, but only two aspects of it: his criticism of an excessive emphasis on knowledge and his anti-Christian orientation. Nietzsche, in his opinion, asserted the supremacy of anti-rational and mythical forces over the cult of learning and the ethos of progress on the one hand and over the slavereligion Christianity on the other. In his revolutionary transvaluation of values, the principles of life, aesthetics, and secularism came into conflict with the principles of knowledge, ethics, and faith. One had to express life and authenticity rather than intellect, reason, and “the book”. The significance of the Nietzschean revolt of Berdichevsky, Tchernikovsky, Shneur, and others was completely different from that of the reactions of Haskalah literature.82 While in Moshe Lieb Lilienblum, Mendele and Yehuda Lieb Gordon there was a strong anti-traditional bias, these writers and poets of the Haskalah all shared a desire for a synthesis between religion and life, a desire whose source was an aspiration to a rational life in accordance with European bourgeois liberalism. But the writers and poets of the Hebrew revival opposed life to religion and exalted creative powers and mystical feelings. Unlike the way of thinking of the Haskalah, which lay emphasis on restraint and balance, the new Hebrew literature engendered a cult of irrationality and myth. Eros was now seen as the source of creativity. This was Kurzweil’s starting-point, and he explained these phenomena as neurotic reactions, feelings of self-castigations, and outbursts of sadism, as demonstrated by the heroes of Berdichevsky and Brenner, and also by Haim Nachman Bialik and Jacob Cohen. Kurzweil exposed Berdichevsky’s existentialism not only in his stories but also in his articles. Kurzweil’s article written in 1952, “The Nature and Origins of the ‘Young Hebrews’ (‘Canaanites’)”, was an attack on the secularizing trend of Hebrew modernism represented by Berdichevsky, the Tse’irim and the other poets and writers of the Hebrew revival.83 The main point of the article was the exposure

Introduction  21 of the Zionist ideology as a territorialization of Judaism and the unmasking of Israeli nationalism in its claim to be the heir to the Jewish religion. Although Kurzweil’s article ostensibly dealt with the ideas of the “Canaanite” group and its roots in the culture of the Hebrew revival, already on its appearance it was perceived as a manifesto of the opposition expressing a conservative point of view in the face of the crystallization of the Israeli collective self-portrait. The Canaanite movement, said Kurzweil, was the ultimate conclusion of cultural tendencies that began with the Haskalah and had a radical continuation in the culture of the Hebrew revival.84 The “Canaanites” did not represent an original awareness but were an Israeli strain of an anti-religious Jewish phenomenon that existed in the European exile. This process of national secularization began with Yehuda Lieb Gordon, Mendele and Smolenskin, and continued with Berdichevsky and the Tse’irim, Shneur, Brenner, Tchernikovsky and Hazzaz, reappearing in a new form in the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) with the poetry of Aharon Amir and Yonatan Ratosh.85 Ratosh, for example, adopted Nietzsche’s attitude to the modern subject as a tragic existence, and aspired to replace it with the lost vitality that was present at ancientheroic cultures such as that of the Canaanites. He shared the Nietzschean attraction to the classic civilizations, their “will to power” and their desire for heroic deeds. In the literature of the Hebrew revival one finds an overt or hidden Nietzschean strain which Kurzweil called “an imitation of Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values, a turning-point manifested in the change from a religious culture, way of thinking and self-awareness to modern secular life”. If Kurzweil’s analysis made Berdichevsky’s heretical secularism lead to a Canaanite orientation that undermined the Jewish faith, Ahad Ha-Am also in his opinion led to a denial of the Jewish religion and a severance of the continuity of Jewish history. What is special about Kurzweil’s criticism is that he did not, like his predecessors, set up Berdichevsky in opposition to Ahad Ha-Am, but saw both these thinkers as opposite sides of the same coin which derived its inspiration from the works of Nietzsche among other things. One should remember that Berdichevsky and Ahad Ha-Am represented two contrary historiographical approaches. Ahad Ha-Am adopted Hegel’s concept of progress and depicted the evolutionary development of Jewish history as a universalist mission to disseminate morality among the peoples of the world, whereas Berdichevsky followed Nietzsche who denied any moral value to historical processes, which are beyond good and evil. The “Jewish Nietzscheanismus”, according to Ahad Ha-Am, was an advanced stage in the development of am-olam (a universal people) – a stage in which the human element, the creation of the Übermensch, fuses with the Aryan element, the will to force.86 Kurzweil found it difficult to forgive Ahad Ha-Am for this arbitrary juxtaposition, whereas “the Ashkenazi [German] Nietzsche could be forgiven for not being acquainted with the spirit of Judaism and confusing it with another teaching that came out of it and separated from it”.87 In his view, to speak of a “Jewish Nietzscheanismus” was an unintentional joke and an apologia. A person who claimed to understand the religious essence of Judaism could not speak of a “Jewish Nietzscheanismus”, just as one cannot speak of a “religious atheism”.

22  Introduction The common feature of Kurzweil’s historiographical articles, which were published in the newspaper Haaretz in the 1950s and ’60s and were included in his book Struggling for the Values of Judaism (1970), was, as he himself said, the portrayal of the shift in the development of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, for which Scholem was responsible, from the religious dimension in the approach to Judaism, to the historical dimension. However, the historicization of Judaism was the original characteristic of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, and from that point of view, the Wissenschaft – violently attacked by Scholem  – which came into being in Germany in the nineteenth century, and the “Science of Judaism”, which sprang up in the Zionist context in the Yishuv and the State of Israel, had a similar fate. In this context, Kurzweil was surprised at Scholem: How did he lose the complacency that has characterised the science of Judaism until today? Did he not also exaggerate his opposition to Nietzsche? I permit myself to express the heretical opinion that there is a surprising similarity between the anti-bourgeois principle, which recoils from complacency, in Scholem’s historiography, and the uncompromising opposition to the cult of science and history to be found in all Nietzsche’s works. And I  claim, moreover, that Nietzsche’s essay, On the Use and Abuse of History, is no less relevant today than it was ninety years ago.88 Underlying Scholem’s political theology is the intention, said Kurzweil, of “throwing a bridge between Sabbetaianism and secular Zionism”. In Kurzweil’s article, “Dissatisfaction in History and the Science of Judaism” one discerns the influence of Nietzsche on the writer of the article. In Scholem’s claim to scientific objectivity Kurzweil identified a subjective will to power: this seemingly scientific enterprise was a mask for “the modern national perspective”.89 Here we have a criticism of the tendency to make scientific conclusions dependent on their political context and the historian’s point of view. Kurzweil’s critique focuses on the blurring of the boundaries between theology and history, the blending of sacred and profane. In Kurzweil’s opinion, there was in Scholem’s political theology a fusion of scientific research and the trends, longings and interests of our period: that is to say, of secular Zionism [. . .]. The starting-point of all his productions is the conscious mobilization of the work [. . .] for present-day national purposes.90 Like Nietzsche, who revealed the theological nakedness of historical concepts, Kurzweil criticized the religious-eschatological source of Scholem’s historiography, and asked, “Is the end [of Judaism] a bundle of myths and anti-myths?”91 There is a strong correlation between the presence of Nietzsche in Israel (Scheib) Eldad’s (1910–1996) life and his adoption of Nietzsche for the Israeli Messianic radical right. Although Eldad is known, in the Israeli Nietzschean context, first and foremost for his splendid achievement in translating Nietzsche into Hebrew. It is interesting to see how he adopted intellectual and stylistic elements

Introduction  23 of the Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie suited to his view of the world and his radical ideology, the way in which the voluntaristic currents of philosophy shaped his conceptual and political outlook, and the place they had in his espousal of the voluntaristic-Messianic current in Zionism and Judaism. Three biographical elements are interwoven in the life and thought of Eldad: his position in the leadership of Lehi (acronym of “Lohamei Herut Israel”, Fighters for Israel’s Freedom, known in English as the Stern Group), his national-­ existentialist outlook, and his translation of Nietzsche into Hebrew.92 This interrelationship between his biography and philosophy is paralleled by what he wrote about Nietzsche in his introduction to Beyond Good and Evil, the first book of Nietzsche’s he translated: There have been few philosophers whose personal biography had such importance for their work as that of Nietzsche, although it may also be said that conversely there are few philosophers whose biography has been as much influenced by their thought as that of Nietzsche.93 Israel (Scheib) Eldad was born in 1910 in Eastern Galicia. He enrolled for religious studies at the Rabbinical Seminary of Vienna and completed his doctorate on “The Voluntarism of Eduard von Hartmann, based on Schopenhauer” at the University of Vienna. He joined the staff of the Teachers’ Seminary in Vilna in 1937 and rose in the ranks of the rightist Jewish youth-movement “Betar” to the position of regional staff officer. When the Second World War broke out, Scheib escaped from Warsaw together with Menachem Begin, who became Israel’s prime minister in 1977. He arrived in mandatory Palestine in 1941 and joined the Lehi underground movement in opposition to the British authorities. “Eldad” was one of several aliases Scheib adopted while living underground and it became the name by which he is remembered. After Lehi founder Avraham Stern was killed by the British, Eldad became one of a triumvirate of Lehi commanders. For the next six years, he wrote articles for various underground newspapers, some of which he edited. He also wrote some of the speeches delivered in court by Lehi defendants. Eldad was arrested by the British while fleeing a Tel Aviv apartment and was imprisoned in Jerusalem. After the 1948 war Eldad published a revolutionary journal, Sulam (Ladder), and also spent half of 1949 writing his memoirs, entitled Maasar Rishon (First Tithe). Eldad was known as the doyen of Israeli nationalists. He obtained a post teaching Bible and Hebrew literature in an Israeli high school until Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who was afraid Eldad would imbue the students with his Lehi ideology, intervened and had him dismissed. Eldad found that few people were willing to hire him after Ben-Gurion labeled him a danger to the state. He turned to literary work, wrote histories of underground battles, a newspaperstyle review of Jewish history called Chronicles, a book of Bible commentaries (Hegionot Mikra), other books, weekly newspaper columns, encyclopedia entries, and so on. In 1962, Eldad was made a lecturer at the technical institute in Haifa and taught there for 20 years. In 1998, he was awarded Israel’s Bialik Prize for

24  Introduction his contributions to Israeli thought and especially for his splendid seven-volume translation of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Eldad saw the Greek philosophers and the biblical prophets as a turning-point in the Greek and the Hebrew cultures respectively. Until they appeared, said Eldad, these ancient cultures were outstanding for their heroic character. The rationalistic philosophizing of Socrates and Plato impaired this instinctive and creative vitality just as the fulminating prophets disapproved of the heroism, dancing, and lustfulness of the Dionysian David. To Eldad’s question of how Nietzscheanism was possible in the Holy Land, Kaufmann answered with a biblical verse describing David dancing frantically before the Lord, and in this way the secret was revealed of the connection between the Hebrew translator and the philosopher from Princeton. Eldad also saw Nietzschean dance as a central principle in The Gay Science, and to support his case he quoted Zarathustra, who would only have faith in a god that danced. Nietzsche, and, following him, his translators – Eldad in Hebrew and Kaufmann in English  – were drawn to a Hebraism intermixed with Hellenism, and this was the reason for their heroic interpretation of the history of biblical Israel. And this also explains Eldad’s participation in the Hebrew-­ Nietzschean-Hellenizing tradition, which began with Berdichevsky and the poets of the “Young Hebrews”, Tchernikovsky and Zalman Schneur.94 Now I will look at each test-case separately. In order to understand the special influence of Nietzsche, I will examine the philosophical context of each thinker in turn. An examination of the adoption, adaptation, transposition, affinity with and even distortion of Nietzschean concepts in the different historical contexts bestows a variety of meanings on these expressions and reveals the strategies of discourse of each individual thinker. The question that has concerned us is, how did important Jewish thinkers representing major schools of thought in nationalism, religion, and Jewish culture read Nietzsche? In which way did they utilize Nietzschean themes? Which Nietzschean principles (e.g., the death of God, the will to power, the Übermensch, the transvaluation of values, the revolt against history) did they choose to emphasize and which did they choose to ignore? Jewish writers adopted in various degrees the viewpoints, critical interpretations, and religious heresies in Nietzsche’s writings. What is it about the Nietzschean texts that makes them so suggestive, attractive, and repellent?

Notes 1 For the most recent study on the reception of Nietzsche, see Jennifer Ratner-­ Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche – A History of an Icon and His Ideas, Chicago and London 2012.   Earlier studies of the reception of Nietzsche in national cultures are Guy De Portales, Nietzsche en Italie, Paris 1929; Geneviève Bianquis, Nietzsche en France, Paris 1929.   For some studies of the reception of Nietzsche in other countries, see Patrick Bridgewater, Nietzsche in Anglosaxony: A Study of Nietzsche’s Impact on English and American Literature, Leicester 1972; Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche in Russia, Ewing 1986; idem. Nietzsche and Soviet Culture, Cambridge 1994; Gonzalo Sobejano, Nietzsche en España, Madrid 1967; David S. Thatcher, Nietzsche in England

Introduction  25

2

3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22

1890–1914: The Growth of a Reputation, Toronto 1970; Douglas Smith, Transvaluation: Nietzsche in France 1872–1972, Oxford 1996; Christopher Forth, Zarathustra in Paris; The Nietzsche Vogue in France 1891–1918, DeKalb 2001. Robert C. Holub, Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-­Judaism, Princeton 2015. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Princeton 1950. Emmanuel Ben-Gurion, Private Sphere, Tel Aviv 1980, 197. [Hebrew]. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Minneapolis 1986. Pierre Bouretz, Witnesses for the Future: Philosophy and Messianism, trans. Michael B. Smith, Baltimore 2010. Michael Duffy and Willard Mittelman, “Nietzsche’s Attitude Towards the Jews”, Journal for the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 301–317. Weaver Santaniello, Nietzsche, God and the Jews: His Critique of Judeo-Christianity in Relation to the Nazi Myth, New York 1994. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews, Penn State University 1998. Menahem Brinker, “Nietzsche and the Jews”, Iyyun, 48 (1999): 421–446. [Hebrew]. See the special issue on “Nietzsche and the Jews”, New Nietzsche Studies, vol. 7, 3–4 (2007–2008); Dominique Bourel and Jacques Le Rider, De Sils-Maria à Jérusalem; Nietzsche et le Judaisme. Les intellectuelles juifs et Nietzsche, Paris 1991; Werner Stegmaier and Daniel Krochmalnik, eds., Jüdischer Nietzscheanismus, Forschungskonferenz des Instits für Philosophie der Ernst-Moritzs-Arendt-Universität Greifswald und der Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg (3–6 September 1995), Berlin, New York 1997. David Ohana, “The Nietzschean Revolution”, The Dawn of Political Nihilism, vol. 1 of The Nihilist Order, Brighton (2009), 13–53. Walter H. Sokel, “Political Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in Walter Kaufman’s Image of Nietzsche”, Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983): 436–442. Clayton Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Con, Albany 1990; Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA 1987. Michal Haar, “Nietzsche and the Metamorphosis of the Divine”, in Philip Blond, ed., Post-Secular Philosophy, London 1998, 157–176. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke, eds. Giogio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 17 (4), Section 5, Berlin 1975–2004. Martin Heidegger used to begin his course on Nietzsche with this question, but the intention was not the familiar statement that “God is dead”, but a call for a return of the gods which was given a new meaning, this time a political one. Lorin Anderson, “Freud, Nietzsche”, Salmagundi 47–48 (Winter–Spring 1980); Shlomo Pines, “Nietzsche: Psychology vs. Philosophy and Freedom”, in Yirmiyahu Yovel, ed., Nietzsche as Affirmative Thinker, Dordrecht 1986, 147–159; Yaakov Golomb, Nietzsche’s Enticing Psychology of Power, Ames 1989. Debra Bergoffen, “Introduction: Nietzsche and the Jews”, New Nietzsche Studies, 7, 3–4 (2007–2008): 1–3. Karl Lowith, “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism”, New German Critique 45 (Fall 1988). These include Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Berdyaev, Adolf Harnack, Ernst Treoelsch, Albert Schweizer, Dietrich Bonhoffer, William Ernest Hocking, and Paul Tillich. See in particular, Hans Gallwitz, “Friedrich Nietzsche als Erzieher zum Christentum”, Preussische Jahrbücher 83/84 (1896). Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University”, in Gunter Neske and Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, New York 1990, 90.

26  Introduction 23 Lou Salome, Nietzsche, trans. Siegfried Mandel, Redding Ridge 1988, 88. 24 Hillel Zeitlin, “Friedrich Nietzsche – His Life, Poetry and Philosophising”, Ha-Zman (Vilna), 1 (January 1905): 127. [Hebrew]. 25 Moshe Waldocks, “Hillel Zeitlin – The Early Years, 1894–1919”, Brandeis University, Ph.D. Dissertation 1984, 77. 26 Mordechai Lansky, “With Hillel Zeitlin in the Warsaw Ghetto”, Mozna’im, 48 (1979): 126. [Hebrew]. For more on his last days in the Warsaw Ghetto, see Hillel Zeidman, “The Day Hillel Zeitlin Was Expelled”, Ha-Boker, 21 September 1945. [Hebrew]. In a letter to Zeidman, Zetlin said he saw the sufferings of the Warsaw Ghetto as the birth pangs of the Messiah: “Don’t you now hear the footsteps of the Messiah?” 27 Israel Cohen, “Hillel Zeitlin’s Ladder”, Mozna’im, 48 (1979): 254. [Hebrew]. 28 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the People of Israel”, Daybreak, 205. 29 Simcha-Bonem Urbach, “The Story of His Life”, in Yishiyahu Wolfsburg and Zvi Harkabi, eds., Sefer Zeitlin (The Book of Zeitlin), Jerusalem 1948, 9–60. [Hebrew]. 30 Hillel Zeitlin, “Good and Evil as Seen by the Jewish Sages and the Sages of the Nations”, Ha-Shiloah, 5, (January–June 1899): 289–301; 395–405; 493–505; 6 (July– December  1899): 289–299; 397–404; 494–503; 7 (January–June  1901): 385–395; 497–507; 8 (July–December 1901): 201–211. [Hebrew]. Reprinted in Selected Works, vol. 2, part 1, Warsaw 1910. 31 Shraga Bar-Sela, Between a Storm and Silence: The Life and Teaching of Hillel Zeitlin, Tel Aviv 1999, 13–22. [Hebrew]; Y.L.G. Kahanowitz, From Homel to Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv 1952, 90–91. [Hebrew]. 32 Zeitlin, “Friedrich Nietzsche – His Life, Poetry and Philosophising”, Ha-Zman (Vilna), vols. 1–3 (January-October  1905: 113–124; 125–135; 131–141; 398–419; 423–431. [Hebrew]. 33 Zeitlin, “Superman or Supreme God?” Meshu’ot (Odessa), 1 (1919): 237–258. [Hebrew]. Reprinted in: Zeitlin, On the Border of Two Worlds, Tel Aviv 1965, 49–68. [Hebrew]. 34 Zeitlin, “A Summary of My Life”, Ketuvim 2, 28, 4 April 1928, I. [Hebrew]. 35 Ibid. 36 Zeitlin, “L. Shestov”, Ha-Meshorer 2, 5 (May 1907), 177. [Hebrew]. 37 George G. Kline, “Nietzschean Marxism in Russia”, Religious and Anti-Religious Thought in Russia, Chicago 1968, 166–183; Bernice G. Rosenthal, “Stages of Nietzscheanism – Merezhkovsky’s Intellectual Evolution”, 69–94; see, for example, Lev Shestov, “Dostoevsky and Nietzsche”, trans. Spencer Roberts, in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, ed., Bernard Martin, Athens 1969, 141–322. 38 Zeitlin, “Superman or Supreme God?”, 49. 39 Ibid., 51. 40 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallow, New York 1971. 41 Letter of Rosenzweig to his mother, 23 October 1913. 42 Rosenzweig to Rudolf Ehrenburg, 31 October 1913. 43 Ohana, “Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and the Fascist Myth”, Homo Mythicus, 95–105. 44 Moshe Schwartz, “Introduction”, in Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 14–15 [Hebrew]; Ed. N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, New York 1976, 95. 45 Rosenzweig, “Diary”, Selection of Legends, 16 June 1922, 252. 46 Ibid., 20 July 1922, 282. 47 Rosenzweig to Victor Ehrenburg, ibid., 9 May 1918, 140. 48 Rosenzweig to Victor Ehrenburg, 24 October 1924, 332. 49 Rosenzweig, “Diary’ ”, 1 September 1910, 30. See Rosenzweig’s doctoral dissertation “Hegel und der Staat”, Verlag von K. Oldenbourg, Munich and Berlin, 1920. 50 Richard Cohen, “Rosenzweig Versus Nietzsche”, 346–366, 268; idem., Elevations, the Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas, Chicago 1994.

Introduction  27 51 Nahum N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, New York 1953; Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, Detroit 1992; Paul Mendes-Flohr, The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, Hanover 1988; Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, “From the Beginning of Our Bible Translation”, Scripture and Translation, trans. Lawrence Rosenwald with Everett Fox, Bloomington, 1994. 52 Buber, “Dialogue”, The Secret of Discourse: On Man and His Situation in the Face of Existence, Jerusalem 1973, 132–133 [Hebrew]. 53 Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche – A Critical Life, Middlesex 1980; Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Cambridge 2010, 531–533. 54 Buber, “The Horses”, The Hidden Light. 55 Plato, “Phaedrus”, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, Cambridge 1997, 524–525. 56 See especially Steven Kepnes, The Text as Thou: Martin Buber’s Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology, Bloomington 1992. 57 Martin Friedman, Encounter on the Narrow Ridge: A Life of Martin Buber, New York 1991. 58 Martin Buber, “Autobiographical Fragments”, in Paul Schilpp and Maurice Friedman, eds., The Philosophy of Martin Buber: The Library of Living Philosophers, La Salle 1967. 59 See especially: Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche – Life as Literature, Cambridge, MA 1985; R.C. Solomon, ed., Nietzsche – A Collection of Critical Essays, Bloomington 1980. 60 Buber, “Autobiographical Fragments”, III, 12. 61 Robert Wistrich, “Friedrich Nietzsche and the Austrian Fin-de-Siècle”, in trans. Claude Aviram, Nietzsche in the Cafés of Vienna, Jerusalem 2006, 36–52. [Hebrew]. 62 Paul Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought, Detroit 1989, 147, note 2. 63 There is a discussion of Buber’s “mythical hermeneutics” in chapter three. On Buber and myth, see especially: Eliezer Shweid, “Myth and Historical Memory in Jewish Thought in the Modern Age”, in David Ohana and Robert Wistrich, eds., Myth and Memory – the Metamorphoses of the Israeli Consciousness, Tel Aviv 1997, 59–60. [Hebrew]; Moshe Schwarz, “The Conception of Myth and the Problem of ‘Demythologization’ in the Teachings of M. Buber”, Language, Myth, Art, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv 2012. [Hebrew]; Zeev Levy, “On Myth in the Outlook of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig”, in Me’or Ayali and others, eds., Tura, Tel Aviv 1984, 308–310. [Hebrew]; Ron Margolin, “Jewish Myth in the Twentieth Century-Between Research and Philosophy”, in Haviva Pedaya and Ephraim Meir, eds., The Book of Rivka, Beersheva 2007, 225–276; Ehud Luz, “The Historical-Collective Memory in the Teaching of Martin Buber”, in Haviva Pedaya, ed., Myth in Judaism, Jerusalem 1996. [Hebrew]. 64 Gershom Scholem, Something More: Heritage and Resurrection, ed. Abraham Shapira, Tel Aviv 1989, 382. [Hebrew]. 65 Steven M. Wasserton, Religion After Religion – Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos, Princeton 1999. 66 Gershom Scholem, Gershom Scholem Tagebüche, 1913–1923, I-II unter Mitarbeit von Herbert Knopp-Oberstebrink herausgegeben von Karlfried Gründer und Friedrich Niewöhner, Frankfurt am Main 1995, 2000. The two German volumes were translated into English and appeared in a single volume in a slightly abridged form 12 years later at Harvard, from which I cite: Gershom Scholem, Lamentations of Youth – The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913–1919, ed. and trans. Anthony David Skinner, Cambridge, MA 2007, 253. 67 The expression “the nihilist revolution”, appeared in Scholem, “The Sabbatean Movement in Poland”, Studies and Texts Concerning the History of Sabbataianism and Its Metamorphoses, Jerusalem 1974, 128. The “nihilist revolution” is also the main subject of “Redemption Through Sin”.

28  Introduction 68 Alexander Kraushaar, Frank: Frankiści Polsky, 1726–1816, vols. 1–2, Cracow 1895, 19. 69 Rachel Elior, “Jacob Frank and His Book The Sayings of the Lord: Religious Anarchism as a Restoration of Myth and Metaphor”, in Elior, ed., The Sabbatian Movement and Its Aftermath: Messianism, Sabbatianism and Frankism, vol. II, Jerusalem 2001, 471–548. 70 Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 36. 71 Ibid., 9. 72 Ohana, “The Myth of Zarathustra: Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and the Nationalisation of Jewish Myth”, Modernism and Zionism, New York 2002, 29–79. 73 Benjamin Lazier, “Writing the Judenzarathustra: Gershom Scholem’s Response to Modernity, 1913–1917”, New German Critique 85 (Winter 2002): 33–65; idem., God Interrupted – Heresy and the European Imagination Between the World Wars, Princeton and Oxford 2008, 153. 74 Henry Pachter, “Masters of Cultural History, Gershom Scholem  – The Myth of the Mythmaker”, Salmagundi 40 (Winter 1978): 9–39. 75 Robert Alter, “The Achievement of Gershom Scholem”, Commentary 55 (April 1973): 69–77. 76 Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, ed. and trans. David Shinner, Cambridge, MA 2001, 454. 77 Scholem, Briefe, vol. 3, 1971–1972, ed. Itta Shedletzky, Munich 1999, 178. 78 Scholem, “Der Nihilismus als Religiöses Phänomen”, Eranos Jahrbuch 43 (1974): 1–40. [German]. 79 Baruch Kurzweil, “On the Use and Misuse of the Science of Judaism”, Struggling for the Values of Judaism, Jerusalem 1970, 210. [Hebrew]. 80 Ibid., 208. 81 Kurzweil, “The Influence of the Life-Philosophy on Hebrew Literature at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century”, Our New Literature – Continuation or Revolution? Jerusalem and Tel Aviv 1971, 226. [Hebrew]. 82 Ohana, “The Hebrew Prometheus”, op. cit. 83 Kurzweil, “The Nature and Origins of the ‘Young Hebrews’ (‘Canaanites’)”, Our New Literature – Continuity or Revolution? Tel Aviv 1971, 270–300. 84 Dan Laor, “Kurzweil and the Canaanites; Between Insight and Struggle”, Keshet – After 40 Years (1988): 32–45. [Hebrew]. 85 Ohana, “The Israeli Identity and the Canaanite Option”, in Katell Berthelot, Joseph David and Marc Hirshman, eds., The Gift of the Land and the Fate of the Canaanites in Jewish Thought, Oxford 2014, 311–351. 86 Ahad Ha-Am, “The Question of the Day”, Ha-Shiloah 4, 2 (1898): 97–105; reprinted under the title “Transvaluation of Values”, Complete Works of Ahad Ha-am, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem 1947, 154–159. [Hebrew]. 87 Kurzweil, “Judaism as a Demonstration of the National-Biological Will-to-Life”, Our New Literature – Continuation or Revolution? 207. [Hebrew]. 88 Kurzweil, “On the Use and Misuse of the Science of Judaism”, 194. [Hebrew]. 89 Kurzweil, “Dissatisfaction with History and the Science of Judaism”, Struggling for the Values of Judaism, 138. [Hebrew]. 90 Ibid., 142. 91 Kurzweil, “On the Limits of the Authority of History”, Struggling for the Values of Judaism, 182. 92 Ohana, Interview with Israel Eldad, 26 November 1991. [Hebrew]. 93 Israel Eldad, “Introduction”, in Nietzsche, ed., Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Israel Eldad, Jerusalem 1968, 1. [Hebrew]. 94 Ohana, “From Right to Left: Israel Eldad and Nietzsche’s Reception in Israel”, Nietzsche Studien 38 (2009): 363–388.

Part I

Fin de siècle Hebrew Nietzscheanism

1 “It would be a good thing if the God of Zarathustra were the God of Israel”

The criticisms, reproofs, prognostications, and prophecies of Friedrich Nietzsche served many rebels as an ample space for self-construction, Promethean horizons for the formation of new ideas and a channel in which to direct their creative courage. There were some who read Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a biblical spirit, and it is conceivable that its author intended the book to be a “Third Testament”, after the Old and New ones. The famous declaration of the “death of God” does not contradict the religious side of Nietzsche’s thought.1 The progenitor of the Persian prophet wanted to create new tablets of the Law, to set Dionysius against the crucified and set up the Übermensch as the successor to the old God. But Nietzsche not only served as an Archimedian point for those exposed to the ashes of God. The Nietzschean revolution, which unshackled the metaphysical fetters of modern man, climax of the ever-increasing Prometheanization in modern times, was also a significant turning-point for people of the avant-garde in art and culture, educators, and thinkers; political theoreticians and founders of ideological movements; artists and writers; creators and destroyers of myths; radical critics; and young people uncertain about their identity.2 Nietzsche’s radical criticism transcended philosophical currents, artistic boundaries and national cultures.3 Everyone had his Nietzsche. Each generation had its interpreters. Taken as a whole, the interpretations, adoptions, and appropriations are the legacy of Nietzsche, which crossed oceans and was global in its impact, its affinities, and its influence. Nietzsche’s influence already began to be felt in the last decade of the nineteenth century, his last years when he was insane, the years when his works reached his contemporaries, and accelerated after his death – in the first decade of the twentieth century. The generation of the artists and thinkers of the fin de siècle had a great longing to fill the space left by the disappearance of God, a desire to create a new humanity  – a desire embraced by the European avant-garde.4 For them, Nietzsche symbolized all that was new, the struggle against decadence, and the urge to destroy the old world.5 His modern insights found expression in Germany, in Russia, in Italy, in France, and in other countries (and the contemporary work American Nietzsche shows that he also crossed the Atlantic Ocean). He affected many spheres: the artistic avant-garde, psychology, dance, architecture, music, religion, nationalism, war, the Nazi ideology on the one hand and the Bolshevik on the other, and many different political theologies.6

32  Fin de siècle Hebrew Nietzscheanism The globalization of Nietzsche did not pass over the culture of the Hebrew revival in central and eastern Europe at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. David Neumark, whom Berdichevsky called the “Hebrew Kant”, in 1894 wrote the first article on Nietzsche in the Hebrew language, “Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Theory of the Superman”. Reuven Breinin, a cultural critic, needed assistants for a journal he wished to publish and was consequently interested in the Tse’irim. He proposed to Neumark, whom he saw as “the most important member of that outstandingly talented group”, that he should write “an article about Friedrich Nietzsche, who has not been mentioned so far in our literature, and Jewish readers are not even aware that he exists”.7 Neumark, who doubted his own literary abilities, hesitated because he found it difficult to write a scholarly philosophical article in Hebrew, and a few days before he delivered the promised article, Breinin received an article on Nietzsche in German by Professor Ludwig Stein. After comparing the two, Breinin was of the opinion that Neumark’s article “was superior in all respects to that of the professor of philosophy in the University of Berne”.8 Breinin compared Neumark and the religious to diggers working from two ends of a tunnel and meeting in the middle. Neumark came to religious Judaism when he realized that Greek philosophy was bankrupt because its illusion that knowledge would solve all the enigmas of the world had proved to be unfounded, whereas Judaism found the solution not through inquiry and investigation but through its belief that man was created in God’s image. According to Breinin, the works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were spiritual confessions.9 He thought that biographers do a disservice when they are content to deal with a person’s life and ignore his works, “which alone contain their true biography”.10 He saw Nietzsche as a good illustration of this principle. Neumark’s article began with a quotation from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which he translated into Hebrew: “God is already dead, and we therefore want an Übermensch to come into being”.11 The starting-point was the assertion that Nietzsche wished to give his readers a new faith, faith in the power of the Übermensch. The aim of the German philosopher was to reveal the gods who had come down from their thrones and had gone “from strength to strength, from war to war, from victory to victory”, and so to encourage the development of the Übermensch. Neumark criticized Nietzsche chiefly for lack of evidence that the Übermensch existed: Nietzsche talks like an oracle. Now he flies high and now he tackles a question and delves into the depths, and then, in his words, he dissects the kidney and the heart of things. In reading Nietzsche, deep new ideas form in our minds, rays of a new light shine and scintillate before our eyes. Nietzsche’s words are like a wondrous vision, a “great and lofty apparition”. However, truth is not known by proof but through face-to-face contact. We feel it in all its validity and strength, we see it in all its aspects and in its purity. And that is the advantage and chief

“If the God of Zarathustra were the God of Israel”  33 quality of Nietzsche for those who respect and admire him, for he takes us out of our narrow circle and gives us the capacity to absorb the truth in an unconventional way.12 The fact that Nietzsche did not at first address all his contemporaries but only a few chosen ones is to be explained, in his opinion, by philosophical elitism. Nietzsche has nothing in common with the mass of philosophers who despise new ideas, and it is therefore not surprising that his radical thought was received in ”complete silence”, a strategy intended to neutralize the force of the philosophical explosives it contains. Yet, despite the silence of the philosophical establishment, said Neumark, it had an immediate impact on the younger generation. It spread like wildfire among thorns, and it assumed a variety of forms in poems, stories, visions and all the productions of the spirit, and there is not a single profession in the world of thought and action in which one will not find traces of this new system. And Neumark wondered what Nietzsche’s secret was “with the spirit of the younger generation”. Ought we to heed the words of Max Nordau, who described Nietzsche’s thought as “insane excitement over one thing, the product of his mental sickness and confusion of mind”, or was the time not ripe for these ideas, ideas that were in the air and only needed someone to express them? A sign has appeared to his generation. This is a new idea which fills the terrible emptiness in their souls that brings them to boredom. This is the spirit of the time: give it form and shape in your paintings, sculptures, music, poetry, visions and stories. This idea, which fills the whole universe, is the main idea in Nietzsche’s system. It is his doctrine of the Übermensch.13 Neumark explained that anyone who carefully examined the idea of the Übermensch had to trace its historical development. His investigations led him to the conclusion that the basis of the idea was the theory of evolution. As a result, he devoted an entire chapter to Darwin’s theory, “from its inception until Nietzsche renewed it and added to it”. Neumark indicated three periods in the history of the theory of evolution: the metaphysical period, the biological period, and the psychological period, the main feature of which was Nietzsche’s contribution. The third period, the psychological, was that of Nietzsche who made use of Schopenhauer’s ideas but stood him on his head, as Marx did to Hegel. Whereas Schopenhauer preached nothingness and wished to retreat to complete denial: This was not the case with Nietzsche. He stood over the grave of his God and erected an altar to a new god – man. Man recognized his creator and knew that without knowledge of his creator only blind will motivated and activated the world, and that he, man, was the only one with an intelligent spirit. Such

34  Fin de siècle Hebrew Nietzscheanism a being had the right to rebel against his creator, wrest the magic wand from the creation and arrange things according to its desire and knowledge.14 This, according to Neumark, was “the main idea behind Nietzsche’s system”, and most of the Nietzschean ideas, including the teachings on morality, derived from it. The trouble was that normative morality was not suitable to give birth to the Übermensch, as it was essentially a reactionary teaching reflecting a “slave morality”. We therefore “need a new moral teaching, for only with a ‘morality of masters’ could we reach our ultimate land of heart’s desire, the Übermensch”. And how did Neumark describe this Übermensch? “The future generation will not be tiny and weak, beaten up and sickly like this puny generation, but a bold and strong generation will arise, a generation of giants, [.  .  .] a generation of Übermenschen”.15 In the 1920s, David Neumark and Micah Yosef Berdichevsky carried on a lively correspondence centering on a dialogue concerning art, nationalism, and history.16 Neumark, the “Jewish Kant”, took his distance from the Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie, which was beginning to influence the group devoted to the master, the Jewish Tse’irim in revolt against the Ahad Ha-Am type of “national morality”, and which was liable to deflect them from the conservative high road of the national theology. Whereas Neumark wished to expound a systematic theological structure of Jewish monotheism characterized by internal harmony, moral order, and national unity, on the basis of which he became a reform rabbi, Berdichevsky, who was regarded as the “Hebrew Nietzsche”, was throughout his life involved with “heretical religiosity”. According to the distinction made by the theologian George Lindbeck between two religious conceptions, the cultural and the experiential model of faith, Neumark and Ahad Ha-Am can be placed in the first category and Berdichevsky and Buber in the second.17 In his critical article “Jewish Modernity”, concerning four collections of articles by Berdichevsky published in Warsaw in 1900, Neumark criticized Berdichevsky’s revolution of values à la Nietzsche which in his opinion led to historical and theological nihilism.18 In the spirit of Ahad Ha-Am, he expressed a national-theological viewpoint based on the idea that national power was dependent on moral power. Propounding 11 theological principles of Judaism, he described it as a monotheistic, moral religion with historical legitimacy and a national mission: “The people of Israel is a single body in all generations, and its teachings and culture are the product of a single soul in all periods”.19 But in contrast to this unifying theological outlook of Ahad Ha-Am and Neumark, Berdichevsky thought that “in every period Judaism has a different character”.20 In this way, Berdichevsky took a contrarian view of Jewish history and sought to include in it not only the believers and followers of the accepted path but also the heretics outside the camp, as he regarded mythical time as more significant than historical time. Berdichevsky and the Nietzschean Tse’irim internalized Nietzsche’s aphorism, “Without myths, culture loses its natural and healthy creative force. Only when the cultural horizon is comprised of myths does the process of cultural creation reach internal consolidation”. For them, myth was the center of the existentialist

“If the God of Zarathustra were the God of Israel”  35 approach in place of the historicist and progressive school of thought.21 Ahad Ha-Am’s conservative and moralistic position was rejected in favor of the “new Hebrew” who would forge his national identity through a modern myth. The national existentialism stressed an individualist ethic rather than a collective one. This approach provoked many attacks,22 and Michael Rabinovitch, a follower of Ahad Ha-Am, wrote in his essay, “Judaism and the Superman” (1912) that “our young writers make frequent and impassioned use of Nietzsche’s questionable innovations in order to make a new voice heard within the Jewish people. In so doing, they effect a ‘total transvaluation’ in our historical life”.23 Josef Chaim Brenner did not consider Berdichevsky’s use of the term “transvaluation” sufficient reason to regard him as a disciple of Nietzsche.24 Another cultural critic, Ya’akov Rabinovitch, also asked, “Was he really a disciple of Nietzsche? What does this tent-dweller have to do with the ‘blond beast’?”25 A major precondition for the existence of “heretical religion” is a consciousness of the absence of God. “Yearnings for God” bear witness a thousandfold to the absence of the transcendental Being. The individual no longer had an a priori acceptance of the existence of God, a self-evident entity whose existence was reflected in conditionings, commandments, and habits expressed in precepts, prohibitions, and prayers. An implicit faith in the transcendental Being was replaced by the longing for God. The non-presence of God was shown up by his disappearance, his Being was proclaimed by his nullification. This quality of craving characterized Berdichevsky in all the stages of his literary career. A second characteristic of Berdichevsky was opposition or provocation. What if God does not exist, if there is nothing transcendental or immanent? What if God is dead? What then? Does his absence put an end to the possibility of any belief or hope in the future? A third characteristic was religious pathos which still remained after God’s nullification. The pathos was a transition to a form of rhetoric which appears in its nakedness without the religious content. The pathos demonstrated an unrealized religious passion that took the form of lofty and exalted expressions. What we have here is a sort of “inner” religion, something that lies outside the phenomenology of religion, an internalization of states of soul that may be considered a religious manifestation.26 In this phenomenon, one’s attention is drawn away from the social and institutional aspects of things to the inner life of the individual.27 The individual’s conviction of God’s existence through his representatives has gone, but the longing for God who delays his coming remains. There are no outward signs such as commandments and prohibitions, and there is no religious institution requiring belief in God’s existence.28 His existence is a matter of “inner” religion. The longing for God cries out in the inner religion. This was not, in the literal sense, an atheistic or secular point of view. This heresy is not unbelief, as heresy is not indifferent to God’s existence. Atheism and secularism, for their part, are indifferent to God’s presence or absence. The atheist’s or secularist’s attitude to religion is one of apathy. The nonexistence of God does not cause him to cry out or feel pain or longing; the existence of God is a matter of indifference. The fact of his existence or nonexistence is irrelevant for modern man. An approach of

36  Fin de siècle Hebrew Nietzscheanism this sort is contradictory to that of Nietzsche, who did not make the ontological claim that “there is no God”, but made, or rather, cried out the existential claim that “God is dead”.29 Berdichevsky did not abandon the Jewish religion (as Weininger did, for instance), and from that point of view, he was not a Nietzschean nihilist, but he was not a regular believer either. At the heart of his call for a transvaluation of values there was a longing for a new kind of Jewish religiosity, not a systematic construct of beliefs and ideas learned by rote, but an existentialist type of faith in which there was room for the “heretics” from Elisha Ben Abuyah to Spinoza.30 Berdichevsky did not make a choice between two contradictory religious approaches, or alternatively between religion and secularism. What characterized these was the frequently changing proportion of components of belief or heresy expressed in their conceptual development. Berdichevsky’s “heretical religion” is found in a succinct form in his Din ve-devarim: aseret ma’amarot (Discussion: Ten Utterances), which appeared in Warsaw in 1902: Our soul is filled with such longings [. . .] yearnings for God which the mouth cannot utter and the ear cannot hear. Oh, who will draw us near to the inner religion, to the God within our hearts? Pray to the God that is within you, put thy shoes from off thy feet on whatever piece of ground you live and in any place where you can see the heavens above. Give us both heaven and earth!31 Berdichevsky thought that in his self-perception, the individual believes that “man is created in the image of God”. That is to say, God’s nature is similar to man’s, and the two things are interdependent: man depends on God and God depends on man.32 It is a kind of mutual reflection. The chief conclusion to be drawn is that man is not only a kind of projection of the divine entity but feels “as if he is the first participant in the act of the creation”, who recreates himself and his world every day.33 “Man’s longing to be united with his Maker” expresses a yearning for God, but it is also a testimony to his absence, for if he were not absent, there would be no longing for him.34 Similarly to Nietzsche, Berdichevsky expressed a desire for primacy, for an act of creation that has no deposit of generations behind it or historical necessity: “Give us the first day of the week and not the last day of the week”. The modern Jew wants to write the book of his life on his own: “Allow us to sing the song of our lives according to our spirit, our essence, our existence, allow us to make our own statement!” Berdichevsky wished to be present again at the revelation of God: “Allow us to disperse the clouds with our own hands!” Denial and faith are bound together: denial of the once-only biblical revelation, the theological basis of monotheistic Judaism, and at the same time a plea for a virtual participation in the act of creation. In the following statement, one sees a desire for personal sanctification: “Allow us to behold with our own eyes the spectacles of the Almighty! Allow us to pray the first prayer in which we are enveloped in our spirit”.35

“If the God of Zarathustra were the God of Israel”  37 The controversy between Ahad Ha-Am and Berdichevsky and the Tse’irim at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was one of the most important and significant debates in Hebrew culture, revealing different,36 if not diametrically opposed, opinions concerning the desired national identity.37 In this cultural war, each side took up its pen in favor of its credo: continuity and tradition versus innovation and revolution, ethics versus aesthetics, national particularism versus universality. Ahad Ha-Am, unlike Berdichevsky, wanted to promote ethical universalism as the message of the Jewish people in the modern world. According to him, this was the true “Jewish Nietzscheanism”, a concept developed in his article, “Good Advice”. Ahad Ha-Am linked the Superman with the Supreme People: If, therefore, we agree that the purpose is the Superman, we must then also agree that an integral part of this purpose is the Supreme People: that there exists in the world one people that is enabled by spiritual characteristics to be more ethically developed than other peoples.38 He thought that individuals were not isolated entities but a part of the nation as a whole. Ahad Ha-Am could not ignore the spirit of the time affecting educated Jewish youth at the turn of the century in Russia, a spirit that beckoned to the West, to the German philosopher. In 1897, Ahad Ha-Am formulated for the first time, in his article “Good Advice”, the proper way to relate to Nietzsche’s ideas, ideas that had penetrated the hearts and minds of the Jewish writers who had chosen not to frequent the house of study: We are not content with bringing in this alien material, but we bring it in after we have superimposed it on our national spirit. We see, for example, that the thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche have stolen the hearts of many Jewish youths, and estrange them from their Judaism and cause a rupture in their souls. What should one do? We should analyze these thoughts and take them apart in order to discover which have the power to draw people, and which have the power to repel Judaism.39 In his opinion, one had to distinguish between the human side and the German (which he called “Aryan”) side of Nietzsche’s teachings. The human side, which should be accepted, was the creation of the Übermensch, described as “raising the pattern of the élite of the species above the general level”. As against this, he rejected the “Aryan” aspect, demanding faith in the value of physical beauty.40 In 1898, Ahad Ha-Am published his programmatic article “Transvaluation of Values”, which was presented by Berdichevsky in a German translation entitled “Nietzscheanismus und Judentum” to the Nietzsche archive in Weimar. Ahad Ha-Am, like the Nietzschean “Tse’irim”, based himself on the first interpreters of Nietzsche: Georg Brandes (whose pioneering work Nietzsche – the Radical Aristocrat was immediately translated into Russian), Georg Simmel and Lev Shestov.

38  Fin de siècle Hebrew Nietzscheanism The Jewish thinker looked at the “philosopher-poet”, who had raised a storm in the cultural life of Europe with his radical proposal of establishing a new moral teaching, a revolutionary ethic based on the transfiguration of all normative values.41 Nietzsche, said Ahad Ha-Am, claimed that man’s mission was to elevate the human race through a struggle for existence in which the strong would overcome the weak. In this interpretation dovetailing Nietzsche and Darwin, the Nietzschean ethic undermines the accepted idea of the “good”, which claims that the “good” diminishes suffering and “evil” increases it. The Nietzschean reversal – “that which is above is below and that which is below is above” – was designed to solve the paradox whereby instead of wishing to rise upwards and seeking human models that aspired to wholeness, mankind descended to the level of the masses. Nietzsche, continued Ahad Ha-Am, consequently wished to reverse the order of things: the “good” was henceforth the strong man with the will to power, or, as he said, “the will to be the ruler of his world”. Hence, “the Übermensch is the essence of the human race and its purpose, and all the rest were only created to serve him and be a ladder to him”.42 The development and growth of the Übermensch would elevate the entire human race and not only chosen specimens. What was the reason for the attraction of the young Jewish writers to Nietzsche’s teachings? Ahad Ha-Am thought they wanted to adapt them and transpose them into the Jewish national ethos. Although the name of Berdichevsky is missing from the article “Transvaluation of Values”, there is no doubt that the attack on “our young writers who complain of the ‘tear’ in their souls and appear to find healing for it by introducing European ideas into our literature” was primarily directed against the “Hebrew Nietzsche”.43 Ahad Ha-Am’s methodology distinguished between different Nietzschean principles in order to discover which were to be adopted and which rejected. The correct choice of the right elements of the Übermensch could lead to an increase in moral power, to an overcoming of bestial instincts, to a search for truth, to a demand for justice and a struggle against falsehood and wickedness. An arbitrary choice of the “Aryan” element would on the other hand stress physical might and the external beauty of the “blond beast”. The special contribution of Ahad Ha-Am to the controversy was a simple, concise expression he coined  – “Jewish Nietzscheanismus”  – which, however, was not really new, seeing, as he said, that “it already exists from ancient times”. Nietzsche’s Jewish disciples must have known that Judaism was not only based on compassion: the value “righteousness”, for instance, precedes it in Jewish moral writings from the Talmud and the midrashim to Hassidic literature. The “tzaddik” (the righteous man), like the Übermensch, was not created for others, but the opposite: “the whole world was created solely for him”, and he was an end in himself.44 The precedent of Judah Halevi in The Kuzari testifies to this. Ahad Ha-Am’s criticism was directed at the young Jewish writers who took from Nietzsche only his innovations based on the “Aryan” principle and wanted to implant these in Judaism, which in their opinion had become degenerate. Instead of the “book”, they wanted the “sword”, and instead of the prophets, they hoped for a “blond beast”. He said that although one could understand that a few young people were drawn to the Übermensch as they bowed down to Zarathustra, their

“If the God of Zarathustra were the God of Israel”  39 collective demand for a national healing through the use of force was unrealistic, as the Jewish “surplus value” derived from the nation’s moral mission. Could the Jewish people change its values and renounce its relative moral advantage just in order to be a tail to Aryanism? According to Ahad Ha-Am, one could not establish a morality in one daring act ex nihilo, as morality, like language, is the product of a historical development. The revolutionary call to turn things on their head was doomed to failure. However, Ahad Ha-Am, who set out to curse, stayed to bless. From rejecting Berdichevsky’s destructiveness which derived, in his opinion, from an inane imitation of Nietzsche, he came to formulate the “Jewish Nietzscheanismus”, but this idea was not in his opinion revolutionary but was an added stratum in Jewish evolution. The prophet was the person who demonstrated the moral mission of the chosen people. Ahad Ha-Am was as far from Nietzschean existentialism as east is from west. Although he cast his gaze on a Judaism that was left without a living God, he discerned in it a new secular significance. He saw the essence of Judaism to be its national-universal morality.

Notes 1 On the various interpretations of the “death of God”, see especially Gabriel Vahanien, The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era, New York 1961; Johen Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey Robbins, New York 2007; Thomas Alitzer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God, Indianapolis 1966; Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, Indianapolis, 1966. 2 Daniel Bell, “A  Parable of Alienation”, The Jewish Frontier, 13 (November  1946): 12–19. 3 H.L. Stewart, Nietzsche and the Ideals of Modern Germany, London 1915; James Joll, “The English  – Friedrich Nietzsche and the First World War”, in I. Geiss and B.J. Wendt, eds., Deutschland in der Weltpolitik des 19 und 20 Jahrhunderts, Düsseldorf 1973; G. C. Kline, Religious and Anti-religious Thought in Russia, Chicago 1968. 4 For further reading, see my: Homo Mythicus, vol. II of The Nihilist Order, Brighton 2010; The Futurist Syndrome, vol. III. 5 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, New York 1987. 6 For example, see Ohana, “The Role of Myth in History: Nietzsche and Sorel”, Religion, Ideology and Nationalism in Europe and America, Jerusalem 1986, 119–140; idem., “Nietzsche’s Dimension of Fascism: The Case of Ernst Jünger”, in Jacob Golomb and Robert Wistrich, eds., Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism? Princeton 2002, 263–290. 7 Reuven Breinin, “David Neumark”, Ha-Toren (1925), 76. [Hebrew]. 8 Ibid., 77. 9 Breinin, “Biographical Reflections”, Sifrut – Maasef la-sifrut ha-yafa ve-ha-bikoret (Sifrut – Journal of Belles Lettres and Criticism) 1 (1909): 24. [Hebrew]. 10 Ibid., 23. 11 David Neumark, “An Introduction to the Theory of the Superman”, From East to West, 1 (1894): 115. 12 Ibid., 116. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 124. 15 Ibid. 16 Zipporah Kagan, “Micha Josef Berdichevsky  – David Neumark: The Controversy Concerning ‘The Historical Forces of Jewish Existence’ ”, Offering to Sarah – Studies

40  Fin de siècle Hebrew Nietzscheanism

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

in Jewish Philosophy and Kabbala, presented to Professor Sarah O. Heller-Willensky, eds. Moshe Idel, Devora Dimant and Shalom Rosenberg, Jerusalem 1994, 210–228. [Hebrew]. George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, Philadelphia 2009. David Neumark, “Die Jüdische Moderne”, Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, Bd. 64, 45 (Berlin 1900): 536–538. Neumark, quoted by Berdichevsky: see Berdichevsky, “According to Two Measures”, From Left and Right, 1899, 90. [Hebrew]. For Berdichevsky’s approach to history, see Ohana, “Zarathustra in Jerusalem: Nietzsche and the ‘New Hebrews’ ”, The Shaping of Israeli Identity – Myth, Memory and Trauma, eds. Robert S. Wistrich and David Ohana, London 1995, 38–60. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth”, in Thomas Sebeok, ed., Myth: A Symposium, Bloomington 1985, 50–66. For example, A. D. Gordon, Arieh Samiatizky, Moshe Glickson, Yehiel Halperin, and critics like Baruch Kurzweil, Abraham Sha’anan, Moshe Giora, and Aliza Klausner-Eshkol. Michael Rabinovitz, “Judaism and the Superman”, Ha-Shiloah, IX, 1912. [Hebrew]. Yosef Chaim Brenner, “Berdichevsky: A Few Words on His Literary Personality”, Hapo’el Ha-tza’ir, IV (1913), 1–9. [Hebrew]. Yaakov Rabinovitz, “Wellhausen’s Theory”, Hedim, 6, 2 (1928). [Hebrew]. Ron Margolin, Inner Religion, Ramat Gan 2011. [Hebrew]. Avner Holtzman, Towards the Tear in the Heart: Micha Josef Berdyczewsky – The Formative Years (1886–1902), Jerusalem 1995, 58. [Hebrew]. Berdichevsky, “For Others”, Ba-derech (On the Way), I, 1922, 25 [Hebrew]. Berdichevsky, Entries from His Diary, trans. Rachel Ben-Gurion, Tel Aviv 1975. [Hebrew]; Ohana, The Dawn of Political Nihilism, vol. 1 of The Nihilist Order, Brighton 2009, 13–53. Israel Eldad, “Micha Yoseph Berdichevsky, Between Egypt and Canaan”, Kivunim, 9 (1980): 42. [Hebrew]. Berdichevsky, “Discussion: Ten Utterances”, in Ehud Luz, ed., “Two Types of Holiness in Berdichevsky’s Early Articles”, Around the Dot: Studies on M. Y. Berdichevsky, Y.H. Brenner and A.D. Gordon, eds. Avner Holzman and others, Sede Boker 2008, 9–15. [Hebrew]. Berdichevsky, “Janus Face”, On the Way, II, 55. [Hebrew]. On belief, unbelief, and heresy, see Avi Saguy, Moshe Halbertal and David Kurzweil, eds., On Belief: Studies in the Concept of Belief and Its History in Jewish Tradition, Jerusalem 2005 [Hebrew]. Berdichevsky, “Discussion: Ten Utterances”, 10. Ibid., 11. Ohana, “The Promethean Hebrew”, The Origins of Israeli Mythology: Neither Canaanites Nor Crusaders, New York 2012, 39–72. Asher Rivlin, Ahad Ha-Am and His Adversaries and Their Views on the Hebrew Literature of Their Generation, Tel Aviv 1955. [Hebrew]. Ahad Ha-Am, “The Question of the Day”, Ha-Shiloah, IV, 101. [Hebrew]. Ahad Ha-Am, “Good Advice”, Ha-Shiloah, IV, 1,6 (1897), republished in Ahad Ha-Am, Complete Works, Tel Aviv 1947, 132–134. [Hebrew]. A.J. Band, “The Ahad Ha’am and Berdichevski Polarity”, in J. Kornberg, ed., At the Crossroads: Essays on Ahad Ha-Am, Albany, New York 1983, 49–59. Ahad Ha-Am, “The Question of the Day”, Ha-Shiloah, 4 (1898), 97–105; republished in Ahad Ha-Am, Complete Works, 794–799. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 157.

2 Bereavement, breakdown, and the great heresy

The novelist, essayist, and cultural critic Joseph Haim Brenner (1881–1921) was in many ways the opposite of Ahad Ha-Am as a test-case of “heretical religiosity”. Brenner disdained abstract Ahad Ha-Amish schemes of secularism, optimism, and national morality, and was closer in mentality to Berdichevsky, whom he saw as “a great teacher, a sister-soul”.1 At the same time, he criticized the fashion for the “new Hebrew” in the culture of the Hebrew revival: “Who is the new Hebrew?” He asked, Are we fighting heroes, we, through the contorted verses of Thus Spoke Zarathustra  – we, the few, we, the proud  – Is this our strength with which we advance towards the future, is this the wretched weapon with which we shall make war? [. . .] Is it with appeals of this kind that you will carry out the Hebrew revolution and destroy the exile and all that comes out of the exile? Brenner made one of the most serious attempts in Hebrew literature to confront the existential paradoxes revealed by Nietzsche. His literary heroes wander hither and thither, go around in circles in the dark winter of existence, waver between one thing and another, and end in breakdown and bereavement. Brenner’s characters, who express the meaninglessness of life, verge on insanity; some of them enter into it, others commit suicide. Abramson, in Around the Point, is engulfed in madness: “The fall of man and the wickedness of the world [. . .]. Zarathustra was right: we are slothful, slothful, indolent, too lazy to develop life, to elevate it, to be its creators”.2 And in deciding in favor of life, Abramson confesses to his friend, “Uriel, I can’t die! I’m now convinced, [. . .] there’s no need to die; life’s a great riddle, greater than the riddle of death”. Feierman in In Winter, clearly hinting at the book by Georg Brandes, speaks mockingly of “the disciple of that aristocratic radical, or, more precisely, that radical aristocrat, Friedrich Nietzsche”.3 And Feierman puts forward the choice: “madness or selfimmolation, and you have chosen death”. In In Winter, we read that the hero lives in squalor, degradation, abhorred by man, a fly, or a worm, but when he goes out into the night, he sees the lights of the buildings in the town shining in the darkness [. . .] many thousands of eyes of flame. Here was the yeshiva, the police-station, the barracks,

42  Fin de siècle Hebrew Nietzscheanism the prison [. . .]. In all these buildings, there was life, desires, emotions, pleasures, actions, suffering. The elderly Arye Lapidus in From Here and There, the literary realization of pure labor exemplified by A. D. Gordon, was in his own town called a “Nietzschean Zionist”.4 And here too we read, “I’m going out of my mind, but that isn’t true either. I’m not losing my wits [. . .] I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive, and that’s it”. And he adds optimistically, “How unpleasant it is to be a putrid corpse and how pleasant it is to exist. How nice it is to live!” Yehezkiel Hafetz in Breakdown and Bereavement also thinks about the possibility of extinction: “His look seemed to ask, ‘Would everything end immediately? Would he finally find the strength in himself to root out the filthy hell within him through a redeeming cessation of life?’ ”5 But, despite this, Brenner sings the praises of an intensification of life: “The weak are impressionable, and they therefore live intensely. And generally, it must be said: strong impressions or weak ones, pleasant or unpleasant: it’s all enjoyable, all life – every single breath”. The controversy between Hafetz and Hamilin focuses on the new ethics of the Nietzschean school of thought: “And even the criterion of good and evil, of affirmation and denial – it’s within us. If things go badly with us, we say that life is evil, and if they go well with us, we say that it’s good”.6 Brenner returned to Nietzschean ethics in his article “From a Notebook”, in which he again identifies life with the will to power, life beyond good and evil: “I have one criterion for good and evil, and that is: all that enriches life [. . .] is good, and everything to the contrary is evil”.7 Abramson in Around the Point, Shaul Gamzu in Between Water and Water and Yehezkiel Hafetz in Breakdown and Bereavement are on the verge of suicide, but at the last moment, they are gripped by reality, and as Joseph Even explained, Suddenly and for just a short while they are aware of the beauty and splendour of the world. This is a sudden feeling, transient and momentary, allowing the pendulum to swing back to life. They know that life is evil and bitter, but they experience a few moments of uplift and elevation for which alone it is worthwhile for a man to continue to exist.8 Ada Tzemach also pointed out that “in difficult and dreadful situations of breakdown and bereavement, even then, some sparks will arise from the smoke and there will be a little light in the dying soul which will incline him towards life”. But Brenner himself expressed the positivity of life as a supreme commandment better than anyone else in 1910: “What we need above all is – the possibility of living, living in the literal sense of the word, living and not dying”.9 Although Brenner’s characters are the closest of any to Nietzschean nihilism, they do not affirm a nothingness without meaning: they either say “no” to nothingness or they finally find meaning in meaninglessness. In his great critical article “Self-Appraisement in Three Volumes”, Brenner ends his radical criticism on an optimistic note: “The longing for life within us says anything is possible, the longing for life within us whispers to us hope. Workers’ settlements, workers’ settlements – that is our one and only revolution”. The meaning Brenner finds in

Bereavement, breakdown, and the great heresy  43 productive work which redeems his suffering heroes is poetically expressed in the final scene of From Here and There: And this is my personal credo: Life is evil, but always secret, and death is evil. The world is full of controversy but also varied and sometimes beautiful. Man is wretched but he can be splendid. Logically speaking, the people of Israel has no future But it must nevertheless work. As long as you have your soul, there are lofty deeds And uplifting moments: The rebirth of Hebrew labour.10 The Brennerist-Nietzschean amor fati (love of fate), however, cannot conceal Brenner’s existential unhappiness. What is the nature of this unhappiness? The writer Aharon Appenfeld gave a good analysis of Archimedian point in Brenner’s stories and personality: “His weaknesses coalesce into a fulminating power which raises him into another sphere which I would call a sphere of religious distress”. This “religious distress”11 exposes Brenner to the paradox of faith and denial, “heretical religiosity” which includes the “accursed” Nietzschean questions. Other writers support this assertion. The historian Anita Shapira, who sees Brenner as “a pessimistic and existential Nietzschean”, thinks that “the heretical anarchism of Brenner conceals a stratum of religious longings. There are religious echoes in his statement about living ‘a life without God’ ”.12 Baruch Kurzweil says that “the reason for Brenner’s alienation was his lack of faith. Anyone who does not grasp the especially problematic nature of Jewish existence without God in Brenner’s writings has not grasped the main point”. The historian Joseph Gorny also agrees that Brenner gave strong expression to the meaningless existence of man in a world in which there is no purpose and for which there will be no redemption. In these ideas [. . .] Brenner followed in the footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he admired in his youth.13 The philosopher Avi Saguy declares, “The Brennerist death of God, like the Nietzschean death of God, is not an expression of what ought to be and is not, but a profound expression of the irrelevance of God to life”.14 The meaning of “heretical religiosity” is self-transcendence: in his inner experience, the individual no longer needs an abstract authority above himself, but he constantly longs for it. Paul Tillich proposes seeing the existentialist as a covert religious pilgrim who avoids egoism but gives way easily to pathos.15 The halting words of Hanoch in Breakdown and Bereavement are evidence of bewilderment at the presence of God: Who did all this? Do you know? God . . . good . . . Let it be God . . . and who is God? I don’t b-believe this and I don’t b-believe that . . . I don’t r-represent this and I don’t r-represent that . . . Let it be God . . . He did it . . . But why

44  Fin de siècle Hebrew Nietzscheanism did he do it? You laugh . . . One can’t know that . . . Good, so be it . . . One can’t – and there’s no need . . . and no . . . there is no . . . is no God.16 This situation of standing on the edge of the chasm, this fear of being on the verge of annihilation makes life frightening: Chaim’s faith in God that there’s a father in heaven who watches over him did not give him total assurance when he saw that the ways of Providence are hidden, that it rewards and punishes unjustly – for the wicked do well and the righteous do badly – but it is very frightening and terrible to be without it . . . Without God one can’t take a single step . . . Without God’s protection one can’t breathe for a second . . . Absolutely not . . . One can’t breathe, there’s no anchorage . . . Space is a void . . . and nothing fills it, nothing fills it . . . There’s no God.17 This confession is considered proof of why Brenner is regarded as the greatest heretic in Hebrew literature. In his article “Searchers for God”, he gave a quasiNietzschean expression to his outlook: Has there died out the fire burning within us for liberation, liberation in all its forms, despite the fear of an emptiness that is unavoidable? Do we not yet know that God is dead, God is dead – all gods?18 Despite these heretical declarations, Brenner counted himself among “religious people . . . people far from theology”,19 ones whose books, like those of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, are “spiritual confessions, histories of their spiritual lives”.20 He saw literature as a form of “divine worship”, both as a creative act and as the statement of a position. In his book Being Jewish: J.H. Brenner as a Jewish Existentialist, Avi Saguy quotes a letter from Gershom Schoffman to Menahem Ponansky, a friend of Brenner’s, in which he related that in a dream he talked to Brenner. “I know”, he said, “the secret of your youth, which is that despite all your religiosity, deep down you were heretical, a denier. He laughed and was surprised that that was how I saw his essence. Yes, indeed, Ponansky, long live heresy!”21 So, what was it to be, belief or heresy? This contradiction was the heart of the matter according to Brenner, who thought that the importance of the mad poet Friedrich Nietzsche is not to be found in his teachings about the Übermensch [. . .]. The teachings are not the main thing but the path, the paths through the depths of madness, skepticism [. . .]. Exactly where you find the great contradictions, the contradictions in the teachings, that is where you find their greatness.22 The contradiction and the tension between heresy and faith make Brenner an outstanding representative of “heretical religiosity” in the literature of the Hebrew revival.

Bereavement, breakdown, and the great heresy  45 A. D. Gordon, the intellectual spokesman of the first Zionist pioneers to Palestine, at the beginning of the twentieth century took part in the controversy about Nietzsche in Hebrew culture.23 In a letter to Brenner he proudly declared himself to be a son of the nation that produced the ‘slave morality’; and the soul of the ‘slave’ is no less dear to me [. . .] than the higher soul [. . .], and I cannot bear this division of humanity into the ‘mass’ and the élite.24 According to Nietzsche, the slave morality was in contradiction to the great figures who were not subject to normal rules. Gordon did not accept the parallelism made by Brenner, following Nietzsche and Berdichevsky, between aesthetics and ethics.25 Moreover, he criticized the preference of both of them for the aesthetic to the ethical. “Aesthetic ethics” (whatever that is) or the higher morality, did not mean anything to him. Nietzsche’s idea about a higher morality, said Gordon, is not the absolute truth as power and supremacy are only one dimension of human existence. If Tolstoy adopted Nietzsche’s teachings it would be a lie, and similarly Nietzsche could not accept the teachings of Tolstoy. And the conclusion was that “there is not one single profound and enlightened sphere”.26 What then was Nietzsche’s contribution? It was not the theory he put forward but the human ideal he embodied: “In the way he set an example – a fine and wonderful example – of how a man can raise his uniqueness to the highest level, cosmic humanity”.27 The main Nietzschean motivation was to bestow on man cosmic qualities. Indeed, the will to power was an anthropological principle at the same time as a cosmological principle, but unlike other anthropological ideas which were set in a historical context, the Nietzschean Übermensch created a new world. In the words of Samuel Hugo Bergman, “the audacity is felt here of the Messianic hope of the prophets of Israel, the bold Messianic impulse of Isaiah”.28 In short, in the idea of the Übermensch, the personification of the will to power, there is a Messianic energy. Gordon put his finger on the Nietzschean paradox. On the one hand, there was the historical context in which Nietzsche worked: he lived at the time of Darwin’s “survival of the fittest”. Philosophy fused with biology, resulting in the racism of the twentieth century. Gordon condemned Nietzsche’s perverted scale of values and the Hebrew authors who subjected themselves to the “European hypnosis” and sought to abandon the egalitarian Jewish moral teachings.29 On the other hand, Gordon did not ignore the “new distances”, the Promethean horizons that had opened up before humanity with the possibility of creating a new human type. But these aspirations for the biological improvement of mankind were incompatible with the “slave morality”, with compassion and mercy. Gordon compared Nietzsche to Max Stirner: Stirner represented pure egoism, and Nietzsche “pure humanity” which was asked to create from within itself a new man, the Übermensch.30 And Gordon wished to set Hebrew culture a Messianic challenge – to combine Nietzsche with the Hebrew prophets. In his article, “Self-Assessment”, Gordon attacked Ahad Ha-Am for not drawing the full conclusions from his controversy with Berdichevsky: “Ahad Ha-Am

46  Fin de siècle Hebrew Nietzscheanism did not finish what he began. He brought forward the ‘morality of Judaism’ and ended with ‘Torah from Zion’ ”.31 In “A Letter That Was Not Written in His Time”, Gordon declared that Ahad Ha-Am was a deep thinker, but “you will never hear the flapping of the wings of his thought against the wall surrounding this limit, seeking to break out of it”.32 Nietzsche’s ideas, said Gordon, were already to be found in Judaism. Although Ahad Ha-Am mentioned Judah Halevi’s Kuzari, he only referred to the biological aspect of the “peculiar treasure”, of that creation of a new human type in the best Jewish tradition. While Judah Halevi thought in cosmic dimensions, Ahad Ha-Am only thought in historical terms, making a historicization of the Messianic idea. Gordon criticized Hebrew authors who wished to imitate others: Berdichevsky the Nietzschean! Berdichevsky, for whom Judaism – and the Judaism of Yavne, moreover – is the foundation of his soul, bone of his bone; Berdichevsky the unique, the rebel, with an original talent and an independence of spirit perhaps unparalleled among our authors in our time; Berdichevsky comes and turns the tables not on Nietzsche, heaven forbid, but on himself. Instead of learning to take Nietzsche’s special path, instead of revealing new distances, new spheres, new illuminations, he simply accepts Nietzsche’s teachings like anyone who accepts the teachings of someone who wants to give them, and makes himself an extension of Nietzsche’s “ego”.33 Rather than creating a new world, Berdichevsky, said Gordon, destroyed his own world with his own hands. His consciousness of the paradox he had produced gave birth to the tear in his soul: “It is the power of the European hypnosis over us”. Instead of “sharing a single crown with Nietzsche, Berdichevsky had to take the crown from Nietzsche and diminish himself”.34 According to Gordon, that is how the “extinction of our man”, the enslavement to others – Hebrew nihilism – came about. The “new Hebrews” became “a shadow of the life of others”. Whether Gordon was influenced by the psychology and philosophy of the unconscious of the Jungian and Bergsonian variety, or whether he was influenced by the Kabbala and supernatural ideas, he spoke like a mystic and not like a psychologist. Gordon developed a new ethics in which there was a shift from the Nietzschean Übermensch to a Gordonian version of the “holy man”. In his idea of a “religion of labour”, Gordon linked “man as a creator” to his creation, and in his idea of “man as a people”, which is a social development of the “Higher Holy Man” he linked this creative Jewish man to his human mission.35 He distinguished between two kinds of knowledge in man: brain-knowledge which knows only certain partial aspects of reality and essential knowledge which absorbs all existence simultaneously. Gordon, who fled from the decadence of bourgeois culture in Europe and at the age of 45 began a productive new life in the land of Israel, claimed that “brain-knowledge”, which dominated essential knowledge, had cut man off from nature and created a counterfeit culture. The old criteria of bourgeois culture which Nietzsche so despised had consequently become bankrupt. Man was henceforth judged by a new criterion: expansion or contraction of life. “Essential

Bereavement, breakdown, and the great heresy  47 knowledge” had brought it about that an individual or society at breaking-point were attracted to a solution of authenticity: the desire to return to one’s people, to be oneself.36 Hence his distinction between a “small heresy”, a quasi-atheistic position, an incomplete and shallow representation of man’s relationship to God, and a “great heresy”, which is profound like a great faith and has a Nietzschean resonance: Heresy in itself is not dangerous, but the feeble small heresy which does not have deep roots in the soul of the heretic or his essence but is sown by every wind that carries this seed and grows, like thorns in the desert, in places where there is no nourishment for superior plants. Great, original heresy, the result of great sorrow and searching thought, is no less fruitful and productive than great faith, which is also the consequence of great sorrow and searching thought. Great heresy already in ancient times brought to the world the wonderful Buddhist religion, and great heresy in our time has created the idea of the Übermensch. The power of great sorrow is that, wherever it exists, it creates.37 Gordon thought that one should be apprehensive of Nietzsche’s tone because it was liable to mislead people of weak character. Unlike Berdichevsky, but like Brenner, Gordon believed that it was not possible to build only on the “destruction of the old man” as it was a slogan and an escape from authenticity. The pioneers of the Second Aliyah, as post-Freudians, read Nietzsche’s works in a different way from the Tse’irim in Europe at the turn of the century. Zionism in its early stages also saw itself as a movement of people in an orphan-like condition, inasmuch as they were conscious of being a young and independent generation defined not by their age but by their orphan-like state. Muki Zur, a specialist in the Second Aliyah, claimed that the teachers of the Second Aliyah and others within it described themselves as people who did not have a childhood and had not been educated by an adult and who found themselves in a situation in which Zionism was the acquisition of a new childhood.38 In most collectivist movements, including the Zionist and socialist ones, there was a strong influence of the doctrine of the will. Its repercussions were sometimes an attempt to change the self into the non-self and to grapple with a collapse of values which was liable to turn out to be an absence of values. The spiritual soul-baring of the young people of Bitania, for example, demonstrates strong individualistic tendencies within the collective and from that point of view the presence of Nietzsche in the kibbutz – from the “Gdud Ha-Avodah”, where they read whole chapters of Nietzsche, to the “Hashomer HaTsa’ir” and the “Nietzsche circles” in kibbutzim in the 1970s – is not surprising.

Notes 1 On Brenner and Berdichevsky, see Nurit Govrin, Brenner: “At a Loss” and Guide, Tel Aviv 1991, 302–309. [Hebrew]. 2 Josef Chaim Brenner, “Around the Dot”, Works, I, Tel Aviv 1978, 450. [Hebrew].

48  Fin de siècle Hebrew Nietzscheanism

3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Yosef Chaim Brenner, “In Winter”, Works, I, Tel Aviv 1986, 188. [Hebrew]. Menahem Brinker, To the Tiberias Alleyway, Tel Aviv 1990, 41. [Hebrew]. Brenner, “Breakdown and Bereavement”, Works, 2, 1443–1690. [Hebrew]. Ibid. Ibid., Brenner, “From My Notebook”, Works, 3, 233–234. [Hebrew]. Joseph Even, “The Narrative Art of Y.H. Brenner”, doctoral thesis presented to the Hebrew University, Jerusalem 1970. [Hebrew]. Ada Zemach, Movement Around a Point, Brenner and His Stories, Tel Aviv 1984, 112. [Hebrew]. “Evaluation of Ourselves in Three Volumes”, Works, 4, 1223–1296. [Hebrew]. Aharon Appelfeld, Essays in the First Person, Jerusalem 1979, 69–70. [Hebrew]. Anita Shapira, Brenner: His Life-Story, Tel Aviv 2008, 197. [Hebrew]. Joseph Gorny, “There Is No Messiah for Israel, and Get to Work!”, Notebooks for the Study of the Works and Activities of Y.H. Brenner, 2, Tel Aviv 1978, 20–21. [Hebrew]. Avi Saguy, To Be a Jew – Y.H. Brenner as a Jewish Existentialist, Tel Aviv 2007, 20. [Hebrew]. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Chicago 1967, II, 25–26. Brenner, Breakdown and Bereavement, ibid. Ibid. Brenner, “Feelings and Reflections [on ‘Seekers of God’]”, Works, 3, 381–392. [Hebrew]. Brenner, Complete Works, 3, 178. Ibid., 3, 209. Letter from Gershom Schoffman to Menahem Ponansky quoted in Nurit Govrin, From Horizon to Horizon, G. Schoffman, His Life and Works, Tel Aviv 1982, 2, 517. [Hebrew]. Brenner, Complete Works, 3, 657–658. See especially, Samuel Hugo Bergman, “The Teachings of A.D. Gordon on Man and Nature”, People and Paths: Philosophical Essays, Jerusalem 2007, 334. [Hebrew]. Gordon, Complete Works of A.D. Gordon, Tel Aviv 1927, 111. [Hebrew]. Ibid., 3, 43. Ibid., 36–37. Ibid., 37. Bergman, ibid., 333. Gordon, ibid., 39. Gordon, “From the Private Correspondence of a Settler and Worker in the Land of Israel”, third letter, Complete Works of A. D. Gordon, 4, 289. [Hebrew]. Gordon, “Evaluation of Ourselves”, Complete Works of A.D. Gordon, 4, 1–89. Gordon, “Letter Not Written in Its Time”, in Bergman, ibid., 336. Gordon, “Evaluation of Ourselves”, 38–39. Ibid., 39. Eliezer Schweid, The World of A.D. Gordon, Tel Aviv 1970. [Hebrew]. Abraham Shapira, The Light of Life in the Day of Small Things: The Teachings of A.D. Gordon and Its Cabbalistic and Hassidic Sources, Tel Aviv 1996. [Hebrew]. Gordon, “Man and Nature”, in Complete Works of A.D. Gordon, 2, 48. Muki Zur, “Nietzsche and the Beginnings of the Kibbutz Movement: Personal Impressions”, in Jacob Golomb, ed., Nietzsche in Hebrew Culture, Jerusalem 2002, 219–228. [Hebrew].

Part II

Nietzschean religious Jews

3 A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka

“The last messianic visionary” Hillel Zeitlin learned to make use of the genealogical tools that had given Nietzsche a reputation as a philologist and cultural scholar investigating the formation of concepts that had arisen in various systems of thought. As an autodidact, and perhaps for that very reason, Zeitlin wished to investigate the ideas of good and evil as they came into being in different historical contexts. The Jewish student followed the example of his German master in his Genealogy of Morals and in installments in Ha-Shiloah began to investigate the vicissitudes of good and evil in Greek, Indian, and Jewish thought from ancient times until the modern period. These pieces were gathered together into a monograph entitled The Good and the Evil According to the Sages of Israel and the Nations, an intellectual endeavor that constituted a precedent in Hebrew thought, broad in scope, and impressive in its ambitiousness. The essay follows the development of human culture from ancient times when a belief in supernatural powers prevailed to modern times, with the understanding that the concepts of good and evil are immanent to human existence and not a passing historical phenomenon. In the shift from the concrete traditional approach to the abstract modern approach, said Zeitlin, there were two coordinates: one, a deep, positive pessimism demonstrated, for instance, by the ancient tragedians who did not ignore evil and forced their audience to confront the workings of fate, and on the other, a negative shallow optimism demonstrated, for example, in the rationalist philosophy of Socrates, which organized chaos like a pattern of concepts. Zeitlin looked at the eastern religions  – the Persian, the Vedic (Indian) and the Buddhist, together with various approaches in the history of Judaism – from the point of view of a 27-year-old Jew influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, and Tolstoy. In his introduction to the monograph, the writer Jacob Fichman declared, “This is the first book to acquaint us with the major problems in philosophy”.1 A comparative historical survey of that kind had been conspicuously absent from the Hebrew bookshelf of the Maskilim (Jewish protagonists of the Enlightenment), who had abandoned the Talmudic texts and taken their first steps in Western modernism.

52  Nietzschean religious Jews In which way was Nietzsche’s understanding of the phenomena of good and evil different from that of the thinkers who had preceded him? In the last chapter of the monograph entitled “The New Values”, which was also his first essay on Nietzsche, Zeitlin described the “transvaluation of values” as an Archimedian point in the philosopher’s understanding of good and evil. “This great and enlightened thinker deals with the question of good and evil, as with the question of life itself, in his own unique way and, as in everything else, seeks here too the transvaluation of values”.2 The starting-point of Zeitlin’s genealogy of the Nietzchean genealogy is that “there is no special Nietzschean system, but just ideas”.3 And indeed, Nietzsche’s unsystematic system does not take the usual form of traditional philosophy, for the insights of the latter require a systematic point-by-point philosophical method. Nietzsche’s revolt against legalistic reason necessitated not only a rejection of the rational content of philosophy from Socrates to Hegel, but also a departure from the logical, consistent form of traditional philosophical writing. Nietzsche’s new type of philosophical writing focused on the revelation of hidden forces. This is what he did in his exposure of Western morality, represented as the selfrighteous product of the Judeo-Christian heritage and the classical European tradition. Nietzsche drew up a genealogy, sought the roots of morality and traced the development of values, using this as a radical philosophical method based on historical research and nihilistic criticism. The Aristotelian telos, which is also to be found in Christian theology, was stripped totally naked. Temporary interests in values claimed to be eternal were similarly exposed. The temporary nature of the accepted values of good and evil, and their relative quality were represented as proof of their total lack of validity.4 Like his philosophical master, Zeitlin adopted the genealogical method, but abandoned the Nietzschean revolt against the significance of the concepts of good and evil in Western culture. The Jewish Hassid was able in this way to dance at two weddings: at that of the killer of Western morality, and that of the religious heritage of his Jewish forefathers who created that morality. The intellectual challenge, like the religious one, was to fuse Nietzschean nihilism with Jewish morality, and to create a bridge between the morality of the prophets and the wisdom of the Talmud and Nietzsche’s trans-moral interpretation. According to Nietzsche, history is beyond good and evil. The pretension of historians of morality to treat morality as a science in his opinion led to a “crystallisation of morality”. They did not make a comparative typology of different moral systems but stuck to their own moral position. In this they revealed the will to power of their moral system. Because history is amoral in itself, or, alternately, represents a variety of different moral outlooks, Nietzsche rejected the view that “civilization is responsible for our bad morals” [D, III 163] and simultaneously rejected the contrary view that “our good morality is responsible for the wretched state of our civilization” [BGE 186]. He represented his interpretation as being outside morality, as one critical perspective on other perspectives. In Daybreak, Nietzsche’s position outside morality, a position that exposed the cunning of morality, led to the conclusion that “I  reject morality [.  .  .] which means that

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka  53 I reject its basic assumptions [. . .,] I also reject amorality” [D,II 103]. But this is a self-contradiction. Nietzsche’s position is revealed as simply another perspective, and if that is so, what is its relative superiority? Zeitlin could not accept the annulment of morality that followed from Nietzsche’s exposure of the metaphysical and meta-historical “arrogance” of Western moral beliefs, but he was sufficiently open to Nietzsche’s writings to be impressed by his representation of morality not as something learned by rote, something handed down from the past or a series of a priori assumptions, but as a philosophical problem with any number of possible solutions. The revolutionary importance of Nietzsche lay in the fact that, where he was concerned, morality was no longer a religious fiat, or a philosophical imperative accepted by all but a problem that could be approached from many different angles. Nietzsche’s view, later adopted by Michel Foucault and some other postmodernist thinkers, was that morality represented power-relationships: “There is a morality of masters and a morality of slaves”. Acquiescence to moral norms had in Nietzsche’s opinion turned humanity into herds. Moral stipulations were a sophisticated form of compulsion; the individual was revealed as a decadent being, conditioned by his rationalism to moral laws, and thus similar to the other analytical beings that made up the herd-society. There was consequently no real difference between Spinoza’s analytical system which sought to repress the feelings and the Socratic golden mean that sought to diminish their importance [BGE 198]. Moral norms were internalized, and imperatives were conveyed through conditioning and education. Nietzsche’s interpretation of the relationship of the strong and the weak, an essentially amoral interpretation, therefore sheds a new light on morality: the strong acts out of self-overcoming, while the weak is subject to enslaving norms. The self-justification of the weak, who find it difficult to observe the collective norms, gives rise to feelings of guilt and bad conscience. The weak repress themselves by ascribing value to values that have no basis in life. The ascetic ideals – science, religion, historicism, truth – destroyed life in the name of a life beyond life. States came into being through dominance and force and not as a result of a social endeavor as envisaged in the political philosophy of Locke or Rousseau: “The state first arose and functioned as a terrible despotism” [GM, II 17]. Long after Nietzsche, Max Weber repeated this assertion, defining the state as “the monopoly of physical violence in a given territory”,5 and Walter Benjamin continued this line of thought with his idea that “the starting-point of the modern state is violence in protection of the law”.6 Benjamin, like Nietzsche and Weber before him, thought that the state, and consequently the law, was not established through an agreement but that its birth was some arbitrary act of violence. Nietzsche preceded him in saying that in society, laws are intended to establish differences between people. “Justice” and “injustice” only have a significance within the context of those laws: abstract justice is therefore not possible as life itself is unjust. The socialization of mankind turns human instincts towards the existing order. The purpose of conscience and feelings of guilt is to “tame” man and make him into a conditioned and disciplined subject. Normality comes about through education and habit; meaning is created by discipline.

54  Nietzschean religious Jews In order to deconstruct the Niezschean discipline, Zeitlin distinguished three periods in Nietzsche’s life, characterizing each of them. In the first, he was a proponent of aesthetic truth; in the second, a proponent of scientific truth; and in the third, a proponent of the immanent truth exemplified by the Übermensch. In the first period, the Nietzschean revolution was manifested in the sphere of morals, which Zeitlin investigated: the shift from content to form, from ethics to aesthetics. The salient factor, in Zeitlin’s opinion, was Nietzsche’s “character and inner tendency”, which could not be satisfied with the terrible words “all is vanity”. He felt that Nietzsche wished to pass beyond nihilism, “to give human existence some content, some worthwhile principle for which one could live and take risks”. The man who lives beyond good and evil must have some purpose which governs his life. This appraisal was in contradiction to the Nietzschean idea that the eternally recurring world has no purpose. Aesthetics and purpose are contradictory, for according to Kant, aesthetics are a “disinterested interest”. These words support Zeitlin’s observation that “aesthetic pleasure is an unadulterated pleasure”.7 Nietzsche, who according to Zeitlin inherited his aesthetic propensity from Schopenhauer, originally also had his desire for extinction: “The salvation of the world depends on the negation of the will-to-live”.8 But, as we know, Nietzsche overcame his infatuation with his former teachers Schopenhauer and Wagner. Nietzsche’s epistemological and ethnological hypothesis was expressed in the following words: “The world and existence are only justified as an aesthetic vision”, or “The world and the cosmos have no justification except as an aesthetic phenomenon” [BT 5]. The metaphysical principle, said Zeitlin, depended on this aesthetic assumption.9 It should be pointed out, however, that this was an immanent metaphysics of a Nietzschean kind, claiming that “underlying all existence is a creative force” that alternatively builds and destroys, for creation and destruction are two sides of the same aesthetic coin, and, in the formula expressed in The Will to Power: “This is my Dionysian world of eternal self-creation and eternal self-destruction” [WP II 1067]. This creative aspect relieves mankind of its pain and suffering and provides an immanent consolation for a world without God. The implication is that in the absence of the illusion of an omnipotent God who is the ruler of the world, the space is left open to man who is the ruler of his world, man who creates the world as he wishes: “The creation consoles itself for its deep hidden sorrow by its beautiful external appearance”.10 Zeitlin quoted Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, who called the aesthetic phenomenon of the world “a poetic vision of the divine”.11 Nietzsche’s early aesthetic approach was influenced by the Greeks, or more exactly by the vision of Greek tragedy which was contrary to the Socratic-intellectual approach. In Greek thought, man is the apex of the creation, the “hero of the cosmos”, as Zeitlin called him, and it is incumbent on men, “to achieve among themselves the aesthetic ideal”.12 The calling of man is to create a universalization of mankind, “both individually and as a whole, and to prepare it through an understanding of the tragic for the disastrous fate that lies ahead of it”.13 Here the aesthetic ideal is embedded deep within the heart of Greek tragedy. The Nietzschian discourse, which moved from ethics to aesthetics, now examined the cosmic and human reality beyond-ethical concepts: nature and morality

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka 55 were said to be two contrary entities.14 Nietzsche’s existential approach was aimed against the philosophical tradition from Socrates to Kant, for the philosopher from Köningsberg continued the false philosophical and ethical line of the Greek school of thought. Nietzsche declared that his investigations were “a declaration of renunciation of belief in morality” and concluded that “the self-cancellation of morality is realised in us” [D, Introduction, 3]. He warned against the tendency I have adopted of calling it “the metahistory of history” by placing moral values in their historical contexts. Thus, the modern individual was revealed as the product of a philosophical tradition, pedagogic imperatives, universalist values and utilitarian interests.15 In his second period, said Zeitlin, Nietzsche shifted from metaphysics to the sciences, from Dionysian thinking to Socratic thinking, from an aesthetic truth to a positivistic truth. At this stage of his intellectual development, the pursuit of beauty was exchanged for the pursuit of knowledge. Modern man wished to know “all the power and satisfaction, the greatness and beauty of the positive sciences”, to find absolute scientific truth. While in most of the philosophers the concept of development has a purely scientific meaning for the purpose of understanding the phenomena of organic and social life, “in Nietzsche this concept is pure poetry, all holy of holies”, a concept that requires one to descend to the depths of existence, its essence and interiority.16 The contradictions and changes of the philosopher did not deter his religious commentator. Nietzsche’s ideas, he said, “generally contradict one another”,17 but the contradictions gave rise to a rich variety of interpretations, from aesthetic to scientific and anthropological. Zeitlin thought that in his third period, the metaphysical one centering on the Übermensch, the greatest change in Nietzsche’s thinking took place, a change in which he began to speak of the Übermensch, of the “great day”, of “the path that ascends to the Übermensch”, and the like [. . .] “Man is a thing that must overcome itself”, the true meaning of which in our opinion is: man, as he is in himself, as he is viewed, his ordinary, simple, superficial life, is nothing – he has to seek lofty spiritual content for his life. Nietzsche first thought that the purpose of man was profound aesthetic achievement; he later thought that his purpose was to gain knowledge, and he finally decided that the mission of humanity was to create a noble type, the Übermensch.18 The basis of Nietzsche’s concept of development was the will to power: “Everything aspires upwards, everything wishes to leave its low condition, everything wishes to rise in status”.19 All that exists wants to spread out and enlarge itself, one power-vector against another. Each vector seeks to demonstrate its presence in reality. The will to power or “desire for dominion” in Zeitlin’s concrete interpretation, is identified with each man’s creative independence. “It is not the desire for life that motivates everything”, says Nietzsche via Zarathustra, “but the desire for dominion”.20 The will to power is both a cosmological principle and an anthropological one: both the cosmos and man aspire to intensification, to power. The identity between them is the identity if the cosmos with the “self”, an identity in which each individual thing is a world in its own right which seeks to leave its imprint on the cosmos. This is an early formulation of philosophical existentialism.

56  Nietzschean religious Jews Following the death of God, Nietzsche came to the conclusion that nihilism and the will to power are immanent to existence itself, and, more than that, they are existence itself: “It is my Dionysian world of eternal self-creation and eternal self-destruction” [WP 1067]. The Nietzschean concept of the will to power is not a late reaction or a possible response to the discovery of nihilism, for in the eighteen-seventies he had already written: “Fear (negative) and the will to power (positive) explain our great consideration for people’s opinions” [A, a, II 397]. The will to power seeks to fill the space left by the death of God. In fact, it is pure existence, the basic condition of the world. In consequence of a despair of arriving at a knowledge of reality as it is, a despair that Kant demonstrated when he was content with a knowledge of the phenomenon, Schopenhauer came forward with the concept of will as expressing the existential nucleus of the cosmos. Nietzsche took the concept of will from Schopenhauer and added the concept of power. Did he in this way create a correlation between the world and knowledge of the world? Each metaphysical system has its answer. Hegel gave a positive answer and Schopenhauer a negative one. Despair of achieving a rational knowledge of the world led on the one hand to the Hegelian dialectic, which boasted of knowing the world rationally, and on the other hand to the Shopenhauerian veil of maya concealing a scene of destruction, nihilism, and passivity. Nietzsche proposed a negative answer: the will to power as the ultimate basis of things, the primary cause of all existence, the meaning of everything. As the last of the pre-Socratics, Nietzsche saw in “every significance the will to power”. Every perspective embodies a significance and the sped arrow of a force aiming at a maximalization of its power. Because the amount of energy is predetermined, the possibilities are limited, and there are only a certain number of changes. The will to power of each individual, each perspective automatically annuls the transcendental world and the pretension of knowing it objectively. From now on there were no objective facts, only subjective interpretations. The cancelation of the definite article revealed varied realities, many wills to power. The will to power is not Darwinism. Zeitlin made a distinction in Nietzsche between Macht  – “the force that brings about resurrection”  – and Kraft  – “the power of the fist”. This distinction between Macht and Kraft makes Zeitlin one of the earliest commentators who, with great sensitivity, plumbed the depths of Nietzsche’s thought. Zeitlin tried to prove his point through Nietzsche’s attitude to Bismarck, whom he treated with mockery and derision because he exemplified, more than any other leader of his generation, the use of the fist”. “While Darwin saw a special parsimoniousness in nature”, Nietzsche saw the basis of existence to be a desire to grow, to enlarge and to expand. The struggle for existence is not for satisfaction but for priority; “Each entity seeks to reveal itself more and more and to appear more and more”.21 The same applies to man, one of the creatures of nature, who raises himself up until he becomes the Übermensch. The Übermensch is thus the personification of the will to power. The Übermensch is the man who elevates himself, who aspires to greater completeness: “He fulfills the idea of completeness”.22 The Nietzschean anthropological ideal, the ultimate embodiment of the Platonic theory of ideas, strives for an absolute completeness, which

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka  57 is realized not in abstract forms but in reality. The Nietzschean Übermensch also throws light on the subject of good and evil: “Nietzsche sees in the world a purpose and a deep inner aspiration that needs no justification, and he therefore finds in it gratification and a special aesthetic pleasure”.23 Suffering is essential to life. There is no point in avoiding it, said Zeitlin, for pain and suffering bring the Übermensch to a loftier plane of existence. “Everything is elevated by suffering”, and therefore “high moral and aesthetic qualities generally lead not to optimism but to pessimism”24 Nietzsche was the first thinker to reveal that pessimism lies at the heart of Greek tragedy, “and there is no doubt that he felt the tragedy in all its intensity”.25 Optimism is shallow and transient, pessimism is deep and constructive. Only through pessimism can a new anthropological strain come into being, and indeed, the man of the present is a bridge to a higher creation: The Übermensch needs no justification. The Übermensch does not ask questions and will not make difficulties. We may bring the objection: “Man is a bridge to the Übermensch”, but the Übermensch in himself, for what is he come? [. . .] We cannot be satisfied with a narrow and limited life, full of rifts, conflicts and contradictions; we should aspire to live a more sublime life, to pave the way for the Übermensch. The Übermensch himself will do as he pleases.26 The great importance of Zeitlin’s interpretation of the German philosopher’s radical genealogy lay in his assumption that there was no contradiction between religious faith and Nietzsche’s philosophy. On the contrary, the Jewish theologian regarded the individual who had the audacity to kill God as “a great and enlightened man”, a “sublime genius”, an “excellent poet” and a “special person” who was an emissary like the prophets, the Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Nahman of Breslav, the early Christians and Tolstoy.27 Religious thought and philosophical radicalism were not self-contradictory for Zeitlin, and the proof of it is that he regarded Nietzsche’s imaginary Übermensch as the twin brother of the tsaddik as envisaged by Nahman of Breslav: a free creation, a creator, and a producer with a religiousaesthetic outlook.28

The School of Hillel and the School of Micah In 1900, the year Nietzsche died, Zeitlin published the manifesto, “Letters of One of the Tse’irim”, Hebrew writers and intellectuals of a Nietzschean orientation who attacked conservative Jewish culture with its view of cultural unity and historical continuity. The manifesto was written in connection with the controversy between Ahad Ha-Am and Micah Yosef Berdichevsky, a controversy concerning the question of how the Jewish national movement should act with regard to subjects like modernity and secularism, the attitude to history and Jewish identity, and the self-perception of the modern Jew towards the nations of the world.29 Ahad Ha-Am favored a national-historical conservative approach concerned with

58  Nietzschean religious Jews national morality, preservation of all levels of the Jewish memory, and adaptation to the Western concept of progress. The “Jewish Nietzscheanism” that Ahad Ha-Am developed in his article “Etza tova” (Good Advice) extended the concept of the Übermensch (Overman) to the idea of an “Overpeople”, a people whose national mission was to disseminate a universal morality whose sources were to be found in Jewish tradition.30 Opposing him was the Hebrew-Nietzschean avant-garde led by Berdichevsky that wished to represent a new and rebellious spirit characterized by aestheticism, individualism and a free literary style and way of life.31 Berdichevsky, whose reputation in the new Hebrew literature as the “Hebrew Nietzsche” seemed dubious to many contemporary and later critics, thought that history was created by individuals and not by collectives, that it was unpredictable in character and consequently does not have a progressive sequence as in Hegel, and that it cannot be judged by its purpose, being beyond good and evil, but was just a series of events. This intellectual discourse was not simply a polemical discussion but a controversy that touched on the most central aspects of Jewish national modernism and its roots, interpretations and the decisions concerning the paths to be taken. Central Nietzschean themes and concepts served as a verbal décor against, which was conducted one of the most salient cultural debates in the history of Zionism on the nature of the Jewish collective and its significance in modern times. Zeitlin looked at the protagonists from a good central position. As a religiously observant Jew who supported Jewish tradition, Ahad Ha-Am’s conservative approach appealed to him, but as a Nietzschean existentialist and as a thinker with original ideas, the spirit of revolt, the individualism, and the original interpretations of Berdichevsky attracted him as well. But here Zeitlin’s attitude towards Berdichevsky was surprising. Like I. L. Peretz, who said to Berdichevsky, “You are both eclectic and decadent, already rottenness from the unripe fruit of Nietzsche and his friends’ tree of knowledge”,32 Zeitlin thought that Berdichevsky was mistaken when he projected Nietzsche’s views onto the Jewish people as positions they should take up. He felt that the fact that Berdichevsky so quickly adopted the concept of the Übermensch did not indicate a humanistic or friendly disposition towards his own people: You tell me, brother, that we must cease working for man. “Leave man alone”, you say in the style of a prophet. “Rise up to man”, you end in the style of Nietzsche. I envy you, brother, for you can rise up to man and dismiss him as worthless in one and the same breath. I am unable to do such a thing.33 The Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch who raised himself up above the common man was seen by Zeitlin as inapplicable to the situation of the Jews in Russia at the turn of the century who were subject to pogroms and in a state of despair. Reacting to Berdichevsky’s aestheticism, Zeitlin confessed, “I cannot harden my heart against the ordinary man with his ordinary troubles”. Zeitlin sought to expose Berdichevsky’s indifference to the sufferings of his brethren not only in the concept of the Übermensch but also in his attitude to nature.

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka  59 Berdichevsky belonged to the school of writers and poets of the Hebrew revival who sang hymns to nature as a source of inspiration and spiritual renewal in contrast to the depressing drabness of the heder (religious elementary school): Return to nature, return to your mother, the mother of all that lives, and lay it upon your heart that it is precisely when you are close to nature, close to the temple, that you are great and vast as they are.34 It should be pointed out that Nietzsche, who took moral “nature” from the Greeks, did not intend to destroy culture and go back to a primitive state but sought to eliminate the dichotomy between reason and life. Reason had to be nature, and nature was formed by the “new man” who effected a transvaluation of values. In the face of Berdichevsky’s enthusiasm for nature, Zeitlin exclaimed, “What is nature to me? What is it that I should praise it and extol it? What is all that to me when my brethren are stricken and wounded, naked and hungry?”35 The sufferings of the Jews prompted Zeitlin to address Berdichevsky once again: You say to me, “Leave man alone”, but am I not a man? You say to me, “Forget man”, but how can I forget him when I feel his sufferings at every moment? You say to me, “Rise up to man”, but this rising is generally no more than a fine phrase.36 Nietzsche’s concept of the aestheticization of modern life played a formative role in the crystallization of Berdichevsky’s world-view. The aesthetic approach suited his revolt against the national ethics of Ahad Ha-Am and the revolution he hoped to produce in the people that was seen as the one that gave morality to the world. The meaning of the transvaluation of values that Berdichevsky demanded of the Jewish people was changing from the values of a collective, which leaned on its past as an invalid leans on his cane, to those of a people that cultivates its aesthetic, individual, heroic, and creative values. Existential experience as such was not to be found in the rooms of the yeshiva, in the halls of study or between the pages of the Gemara, but took place in identification with the rhythm of the cosmos, in action in the unfolding of life and in cultivating the personal style of the individual. Zeitlin attacked Berdichevsky precisely on this point: “I  know, brother, that you cannot forget man and his misery either, but you want to leave him and forget him at certain times – times of aesthetic contemplation and a feeling of freedom”.37 Whereas moral criteria guided the Hegelian Ahad Ha-Am, Berdichevsky chose aesthetic criteria. For Zeitlin, this was not a contradiction, but these were different qualities. Ahad Ha-Am weighed everything in the scales of righteousness while Berdichevsky judged everything by its form and beauty. Sorrow at the situation of his people was the decisive factor for Zeitlin, unlike the intellectuals who, he said, “shudder at the sight of man’s sufferings and his bitter fate. Their poetry is great heartbreaking lamentations, their writings are a jug of tears, and all their words are sighs”.38

60  Nietzschean religious Jews With regard to aesthetics and its relationship to life, Zeitlin distinguished between the school of Goethe and that of Leopardi. In the first school, one found the intellectual who sets himself above the ordinary man, who does not participate in man’s affliction because of his lack of real love: “He is immersed in his inner aesthetic ideal”.39 In the second school, the intellectual identifies with all the sorrows of mankind. The intellectual of the first school only regrets the loss of his inspiration, but the intellectual of the second school participates in the lives of ordinary people. According to Zeitlin, Berdichevsky belonged to the first school, that of Goethe “which thinks that because it has a superior aesthetic view of everyone and everything, it can look down from above [. . .] at the lives of the ants below”.40 That, said Zeitlin, is the way in which the aesthetic approach to life and the concept of the Übermensch resemble each other and derive from one another. The aesthetic school is essentially mythical, for it selects heroic periods in history in accordance with the romantic spirit, a spirit remote from the truth. An example of this was Berdichevsky’s criticism of his sick people and his longing for an alien and healthy culture. The way that Berdichevsky ascribed guilt to the oppressed (the Jew) rather than to the oppressor and his assumption that the oppressed was responsible for his own degeneration aroused Zeitlin’s anger: And here I cry out: No, Mr. Berdichevsky, no! We are not guilty: they are! They are guilty of all that has happened! They, the cruel ones, are responsible for all the evil we have experienced! Those who have poured out our blood like water, those who have slain us in all ages have also made us into a non-people.41 Zeitlin said he was surprised that Berdichevsky “wanted us to renounce our honour in the face of all kinds of attacks and acts of cruelty”, and he refused to accept the idea that might equals right: “Why should we think it a shame to be attacked and there is no shame in being the attacker?”42 This was an implied criticism of the Übermensch concept of the German master and his Jewish disciple. Zeitlin referred to the famous distinctions that Berdichevsky made between “the book and the sword”, “the book and life”, “the beauty of Japhet”, and so on: distinctions that he agreed with only partly because they were made with insufficient knowledge. In his opinion, Berdichevsky was not equipped to relate to the stages of development of the Jewish people and preferred “emotional outpourings” to “investigations and research”. Berdichevsky, he said, “had no understanding of history and historical development”. Berdichevsky’s declaration that the prophets “were the cause of all the evil that befell the people” was in Zeitlin’s opinion an anachronism in which Berdichevsky was really referring to the rabbis. Berdichevsky did not internalize the distinction made by his master Nietzsche between a metaphysical outlook (qualitative and unchanging) and a historical one (dynamic and changing), a distinction that applies both to human nature and the history of mankind. Zeitlin could dismiss both the disciple and his master: “I am not very surprised if Berdichevsky as a historian is too much attracted by

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka  61 Nietzsche’s shallow sayings, and the like”.43 Berdichevsky, he said, did not feel the pain that afflicted the daughter of his people, which was subject to “the brutality of the others”, and instead of “vigorously cursing” the persecutors of his people, he only criticized his brethren. The Jewish Nietzschean was accused of lack of authenticity: “He ought to be what he really is. He should rid his heart of all kinds of ideas that others have imposed on him” – a clear reference to Berdichevsky’s Nietzscheanization. Berdichevsky came under heavy attack from Zeitlin. The “Hebrew Nietzschean” was revealed as a miserable wretch, lacking strength of character, bitter towards his people, “who is only sad about the skeletons of our generations which are embalmed and laid to rest in the graves of books”. Zeitlin was also sad, not because the Jews were immersed in the “book”, “but because they could not see life and light due to the cruelty and aggression”. Zeitlin’s fraternal feeling for his slaughtered brethren turned to sarcasm against the self-condemnations of Berdichevsky, who, he said, wanted “to extend our graves”, to create a “beautiful new life pleasant to the sight”, and especially “a new nation and people, when my soul is riven apart for generations”.44 Zeitlin reacted with bitter irony to the person who uttered these words: The tragedy this poet brings before us is really terrible. He wants to create a new nation, a whole nation, and his heart is torn to shreds. He aspires to a godlike breadth, and feels in his heart the sufferings of all the generations which he cannot shake off. He calls for a transvaluation of values, for a completely new life, and he feels within him the holiness of fringed garments, prayer-shawls and ram’s horns. He aspires to complete redemption, to absolute spiritual freedom, and he bears the yoke of the “holy books”.45 To Berdichevsky, Zeitlin in his life of faith represented Jewish tradition and the frozen past, which was to be exchanged for heroism and the sword. His deliberate attack on the old Jewish world with its books and scrolls, passivity and learning naturally saw Zeitlin as an object of criticism. The Europeanization of the Jewish people and its entry into modern history necessitated an activization of the traditional life, secularity, the adoption of progressive ways, and an internalization of aesthetic and heroic values. Thus, Zeitlin spoke of Berdichevsky’s admiration for “the splendour and glory of heroic conquerors. He contrasts it with the wretchedness and insignificance of his Jewish brethren, cowardly as rabbits”.46 His conclusion was that Berdichevsky did not fully understand the opinion of his master Nietzsche concerning heroism: If Berdichevsky had begun to doubt the splendour of heroism, he would have discovered something that Nietzsche said when he wanted to understand how things stood, and that is that “cruelty is just atavism”. That heroism that is so much praised does not generally proceed from an abundance of soul but from a lack of it.47

62  Nietzschean religious Jews The lack of understanding that Berdichevsky displayed towards the concept of heroism was also shown, according to Zeitlin, in Nietzsche’s description of Napoleon as “a synthesis of non-man and Übermensch”.48 Zeitlin observed that “if we look at the matter through Nietzsche’s magnifying-glass”, Napoleon was more of a non-man than an Übermensch. His exaggerated praise of heroism was matched by the praise he heaped on Hassidism as a movement that paved the way for a modern Jewish life. Inspired by Nietzsche, Berdichevsky thought that in the Hassidic way of life God “creates and renews his world and his creation and bestows on them a new childhood”. In an attempt to cool this excessive enthusiasm, Zeitlin recalled the foolish customs that Hassidism brought in its train and the obscurantism that it cultivated and encouraged. Berdichevsky, in his opinion, exaggerated the depth and greatness of the Hassidic masters, when they were sometimes “very limited in their outlook and too much immersed in the heritage of their predecessors”. Some of them also had “all kinds of false beliefs in fortune-telling, divination and the like”.49 Berdichevsky, he said, who is easily provoked, “tries to revolutionise everything, and not only to provide new values and concepts but to give new values to people whose work is already completed”. The bottom line according to Zeitlin: Berdichevsky is distinguished by his contrariety and paradoxes. Berdichevsky’s poetic side received no credit from Zeitlin, who thought he lacked the perspicacity to see that “Zarathustra is a poet, and like any poet he might lie”.50 Berdichevsky wanted to create something new when his soul was full of the old, and the realization of his ideal would paradoxically bring it to an end. His salient characteristics were exaggeration, over-simplification, gullibility, lack of complexity, lack of self-criticism, excessive impulsiveness – “a tendency to choose new gods all the time” – and a crazy character that “cannot overcome his desires and excitement at any given moment”.51 Selectivity, the special virtue of historians, is lacking in his writing: “This faculty of choice is sometimes lacking in his writing, and we consequently do not find in his work a mixture of the sublime and the light, the delicate and the rough, the beautiful and the ugly”.52 His work lacked aesthetic unity. But, on the other hand, as a writer, Berdichevsky is one of the seers who are untypical of our literature as a whole. He is one of the few writers among us who are able to bestow a special charm on all they write, describe or depict, in a special style, with a tremendous love for humanity as a whole and the people they describe in particular, with rich vocabulary and colour, with great enthusiasm, and with an attachment and devotion to all that is cherished, holy and exalted.53

Philosophy is autobiography Friedrich Nietzsche, His Life, Poetry and Philosophy by Hillel Zeitlin was the longest monograph on Nietzsche in Hebrew since David Neumark published his first Hebrew article on Nietzsche in 1894. The monograph, which was published over ten months in 1905 in Ha-Zman – Journal of Life, Literature, Art and Science, did not provide the Hebrew reader with information on Nietzsche’s

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka  63 teachings as Neumark’s short article did, but was an expression of Zeitlin’s careful study of the philosopher’s personality. The essay, about 80 pages long, was unfinished and was in three parts. The first part, the “Introduction” was a personal testimony with a unique perspective which was indebted to earlier scholars, but which gave a personal view of “Nietzsche the lover, the dreamer, the visionary, the poet, the saint, the recluse”.54 The second, the “Opening”, briefly declared that “the development of Nietzsche’s ideas was nothing else than the development of Nietzsche himself”.55 This was a reflection of Shestov’s claim that philosophy cannot be separated from biography. The third part consisted of 11 short chapters describing Nietzsche’s thought according to the order of appearance of his books. Neumark’s and Zeitlin’s essays were published at a distance of about ten years between them at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Zeitlin’s essay revealed a correlation between the existential experience of its subject – Nietzsche – and the writer, a Jewish Hassid and religious existentialist drawn to the German thinker with the intention of plumbing the depths of “terrible tragedy, suffering without end”.56 Zeitlin expressed contempt for the commentators of Nietzsche who made him into a fashionable subject of conversation, “an occasion for hair-splitting, florid phaseology, ornament  – entertainment”. The irony in the acceptance of the “suffering genius”, declared Zeitlin, was the tremendous popularity he had with the public, “the intelligent public, that same public that both wanted Friedrich Nietzsche and despised him”.57 Because the public swallowed a great deal of superficial material published on Nietzsche, it was incumbent upon the few who really understood the life of the philosopher “to say what they think and feel”. Zeitlin felt it his duty to express his personal feelings, convinced that a deep penetration of Nietzschean thought was only possible through an existential understanding, not through intellectual analysis or academic research. Zeitlin avoided the “beaten track” and chose to take his own path, giving “a full description of Nietzsche’s life and tragedy as I  see them”58 He expressed his personal view that “in order to know the true life of a great man one must lay much stress on what the great man felt and participate to a great extent in his creativity”.59 He did not wish to resemble Elisabeth Fðrster-Nietzsche whose concentration on “transient memories” and the constant reprinting of whose writings distracted attention from “what is most essential and basic in Nietzsche’s life”. Many commentators also tended to focus on Nietzsche the philosopher and neglected Nietzsche the poet. Zeitlin did not explain the reasons for the feelings of awe he had towards Nietzsche’s religious philosophizing, feelings so exalted that “he could not grasp the difference between the sanctity of Nietzsche and ordinary religious sanctity”.60 Thus, Zeitlin saw Nietzsche first and foremost as a holy man, the ideal of a unique religious searcher in an age of apostasy, a man not to be classed among the unusual categories of “believers”, “heretics”, or “penitents”, a thinker who was one of those who could be described as follows: Holy men live like the first men before the appearance of sin, whose actions have no suspicion of “doing things by rote”, who bear no suspicion of

64  Nietzschean religious Jews religious bondage, for they themselves are faith (emphasis in the original), they themselves are holiness, they themselves are beauty, nobility and elevation. They see everything in their own spirit and conduct themselves according to their deep inner feelings. They are called “believers”, but they have nothing in common with ordinary believers but the name: they are as far above them as the heavens are above the earth. The source of belief of the other believers is submission of thoughts and feelings, smallness of mind and character, but the source of belief of men of spiritual sublimity is their generosity of spirit and greatness.61 The hagiographical description of the philosopher did not stop here. Under the influence of Shestov, who saw a religious aspect in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche, Zeitlin took his testimony further and embraced a typology of three types to be found in the works of Dostoevsky. The first type was the naïve man in the garden of Eden, the childhood of mankind where all was innocence and holiness; the second represented the descent of mankind into a state of destruction, doubt, and despair, resulting in the abandonment of all traditions and the rejection of all norms; and the third represented the phase of revival, in which man “again seeks the God he has abandoned”.62 In this third phase, man turns his back on destruction and begins to rebuild his existence, seeking the “fresh horizon of a new life”. In their love and holiness, the “believers”, the heroes of The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, are a symbol of love and salvation. The “apostates” are the “nihilists” who wish to overturn the order of life and transfigure all values, who seek to create in a spirit of total freedom. Nietzsche’s famous saying – “they want to destroy a temple in order to build another in its place” – can be ascribed to them. Because the order of things is rotten to the core, they wish to set up “a new temple and a new God”.63 Karamazov and Raskolnikov are literary examples of this desire to destroy and rebuild, and Zeitlin used them to make a comparison: “If we look carefully at Nietzsche’s inner life, one will see in it the basic types one finds in Dostoevsky”.64 If we examine Nietzsche’s development, in his early life there was a childlike innocence, a devotion to religion and an idolization of Schopenhauer and Wagner, and, as in The Brothers Karamazov, despite the attractions of sin and a leaning towards heresy, the hero withstood the attractions of nihilism. In the time of his youth, doubts arose and the urge to destruction increased; and finally, “the sun arose in all its majesty”. There is also a parallel to these three periods in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: the stage of ripening – the camel – in which man takes upon himself laws and prohibitions; the stage of gathering – the lion – in which desire destroys all it finds upon its path to freedom, desire that has to overcome the cunning of the snake; and the stage of renewed childhood that wants “to destroy the old values and create new ones in their place”.65 The symbolism of Zarathustra runs parallel to Nietzsche’s psychological development. More than anything, Zeitlin was impressed by the “free spirit” Nietzsche displayed in his writings, like a Prometheus bound in chains. Humanity is bound by moral duties, institutionalized habits, accepted norms. When the bonds are

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka  65 severed, there is an earthquake that causes shock and arouses a tremendous desire to break out. The beliefs of the past seem to be vanity, the past is treated with scorn and there is an urge to go very far. But there is a fear that “this freedom is very dangerous for the spirit of freedom”.66 In Nietzsche, the disadvantages of freedom, of the desire for creation and self-construction, find their salvation in art, for art builds and does not demolish, creates, and does not destroy. Zeitlin does not glorify those enchanted with Nietzschean nihilism. Nihilism is only a way-station on the path to artistic creation, a necessary introduction to the will to power, the will-to-personality. True to his personal approach, Zeitlin made preparations for a monograph, Seeing Nietzsche Himself. He focused for this purpose on the parental home of the philosopher who was descended from the Polish aristocracy, on his youth overshadowed by his Protestant education, and on his military service. Enlistment in the army was not a foregone conclusion because of his short-sightedness, but when he was conscripted, he neglected philosophy and “politics were now his preoccupation”.67 Bismarck gave him great satisfaction: “I read his speeches as someone drinks strong wine”. The Franco-Prussian War seemed to him to be a conflict of cultures, and he firmly believed that there had to be a revolution in the whole of Europe. But in the midst of his army service, which he called a “sacred duty”, he was called by the well-known philologist Ritschl to serve as professor of philology at Basle. The young professor “did not make innovations for the sake of innovation, but with creativity”. He was not learned in the usual sense of the word, “but a teacher of a more exalted kind, an educator of people”.68 A  comparison between ancient Greek tragedy and modern German Bildung brought Nietzsche, according to Zeitlin, to the conclusion that ancient Greek education aimed to raise people up, while German education produced limited people in a narrow sphere. True education was based on three elements: the study of philosophy, the love of art, and the knowledge of the classics.69 Zeitlin dwelt on Nietzsche’s friendship with Wagner – an idolization that turned to resentment. Nietzsche saw Wagner and the performance of his works in Bayreuth not as a pretext for a gathering of musical connoisseurs but as a matter that affected all mankind, “an event with the power to elevate all men” whose mission was the salvation of humanity and the redemption of the world. Later, however, Nietzsche became convinced that Wagner was not producing works of the future but a reproduction of works of the past, whereas he, “Nietzsche, had been engaged all his life in constructing the future”.70 Wagner, in whom vulgarity and smallmindedness were dominant, had yielded to the Catholic cross. Zeitlin attempted to decipher Nietzsche’s changing emotions in those days: love of humanity, convulsions of soul, disappointed hopes, and despair: Friedrich Nietzsche had wandered in a barren desert from earliest childhood: the stars did not know him and did not recognise his lofty spirit. People saw him as a scholar and respected him as a scholar, but they did not know his soul, his stormy spirit, his high aspirations, his great quality, his exalted spiritual nature.71

66  Nietzschean religious Jews Zeitlin identified The Birth of Tragedy as the basis of Nietzsche’s philosophizing: “The basis of all Nietzsche’s views, his different ideas, his different feelings, his special poetry”.72 Although Nietzsche gave the impression that he changed his mind about the views expressed in The Birth of Tragedy, Zeitlin thought that all his later opinions were based on this book of his youth: “Dionysius was the god he worshipped all his life”. At the same time, Zeitlin advised his readers not to see Nietzsche’s views as a coherent philosophical system or as a philological or historiographical system, but as the expression of “Nietzsche’s inmost feelings, his deepest inclinations, his loftiest qualities, his most audacious desires”.73 The central point in Nietzsche’s unsystematic system was the search for the Archimedian point of justification of the world. Is there any inner value to the cosmos? Is there any justification for existence? Why, in that case, is there all the sorrow and tribulation? The answer is the aesthetic justification of the world. Schopenhauer’s influence on the young Nietzsche led the young philosopher to the conclusion that the only justification for the cosmos was its existence as an aesthetic phenomenon. What for Schopenhauer was a momentary consolation between one affliction and another became for Nietzsche a philosophical principle of immanent metaphysics, whereby “the world before him was a spectacle, a beautiful sight, infinitely noble and exalted”. Behind the external beauty of the world, there was a glimpse of eternity, a loftiness of revealed power that appeared at every moment in the audacity of life that has no beginning or end, in the universal will embodied and realised in all the spectacles that lay before him.74 Nietzsche’s affirmative statement in Zeitlin became a hymn to life, and not simply life, but its intensification: There is that in man that loves the intensity that is in life, its grandeur, its potency, its power, its lofty spectacle, its victory, its revelation, its mighty hand, its glory, its elevation.75 Nietzsche revealed the pessimism of the Greeks. The people that with all its heart desired a life of joy and beauty, “that fashioned the gods in its image, that created Olympus”, was also a people that manifested a deep pessimism. The explanation was that it was precisely the discovery of the depths of life that required the creation of an Olympus of gods that gained significance from chaos. Art was intended to provide an antidote for this, metaphysical consolation. Artistic expression was a balance between the Platonic principle, “which aspires to measure, to rhythm, to form, to limits, to privacy”, and the Dionysian principle which aspires to “unification, to adhesion”.76 This artistic synthesis gave birth to tragedy, in which “sublimity and beauty came together, Dionysius and Apollo kissed”. Socrates, who was alien to feeling, immersed himself in abstract knowledge. He and those like him shunned life-enhancing myth: The power of myth is beautiful in this, the power of legend is beautiful in this, the power of different tragic types is beautiful in this, that they are

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka  67 truly the offspring of Dionysius. They express the vitality of existence, they raise up those that see them until they forget the simple reality and mundane affairs, and with their strength and vigour give them the capacity to bear life’s suffering.77 The Greek tragedians understood the secret of the power of myth, and so embodied in their works the divine and the miraculous. The person who killed tragedy was Euripides, who in Zeitlin’s words undermined “the lofty divine basis”.78 The process of intellectualization that according to Zeitlin took place in tragedy brought it about that “tragedy ceased to be lofty metaphysical consolation”, became moralistic and intellectual, and in this way came to an end. The revolutionary behind the scenes was in his opinion Socrates, who with his triple formula “happiness, knowledge, righteousness” wished to resolve the contradictions in the world and eliminate art, though suddenly, close to his death, he regretted that he had not been involved with music in his life. Scientific optimism took the place of tragic pessimism; it devastated tragedy and with it the whole of Greek civilization collapsed. Zeitlin, like many of his generation, eagerly read The Birth of Tragedy, one of the most popular books in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. The essay gave tremendous creative and aesthetic inspiration to the Russian and Jewish intelligentsia, which sought to overcome their afflictions in the personal and national spheres. Zeitlin himself, who changed his political position at that period, exchanging Herzl’s political Zionism for the territorial idea, gained spiritual strength from reading the book, which brought him to the recognition that man constantly creates and rebuilds himself. The second essay analyzed by Zeitlin was David Strauss, the Confessor and Writer, Nietzsche’s first essay in Untimely Meditations (1873).79 Nietzsche waged a fierce war against scientific optimism and its outstanding representative David Strauss. Calling uninspired scholars and scientists “scientific frauds”, he believed that they fostered scientific illusions that claimed to heal the sicknesses of the world, but in fact reduced world civilization to their narrow mold and undermined the Nietzschean ideal of the “free spirit” or Übermensch. David Strauss, the most prominent “scientific fraud” and the first among them, “knew how to criticise religious traditions” and was known as a sharp critic of all religions, deceptive models which had to be rooted out and burnt. The “scientific frauds” had the presumption to assert that in 1870 German culture was victorious over French culture. In the face of this, Nietzsche, a strong critic of German culture, called for its renewal through creative art. The third essay discussed was On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874). The main criticism in this essay was directed at the reductiveness of history, or, as the Jewish commentator put it, the way “everything is made subordinate to the past”.80 A combination of religious faith with a critical attitude to an excess of history made Zeitlin exalt the beauty of the moment, an adherence to the existential, “seeing oneself as though reborn, as though seeing a new world, as though a partner of the Holy One, Blessed Be He, in the creation of the world”. This is another expression of Zeitlin’s kind of religious existentialism, in which the free man creates his world not disconnected from his transcendental faith but in dialogue

68  Nietzschean religious Jews with it. This is fresh evidence of the idea that the Nietzschean stage in Zeitlin’s biography was not a heretical or atheistic one but represented a personal, critical, and creative dimension parallel to the religious dimension. Zeitlin internalized the Nietzschean notion that forgetfulness is an essential element in the development of an individual or a nation. Forgetfulness makes possible the existence of a horizon that does not exist in the shadow of the past, that is not subordinate to the glorification of memory: “Dwelling on the study of history deprives mankind of the necessary forgetfulness, the power of beginning, the power of creativity and birth, the power of growth and exploitation”.81 Forgetfulness gives man the feeling that he is a creator and a renewer, not someone who duplicates and reproduces. Those who steep themselves in history become “life’s slaves instead of being its masters”. Life, said Zeitlin following Nietzsche, is the master of history and not the opposite. There is no doubt that in writing these things he had Jewish history in mind. The controversy in Hebrew circles at that time concerned the question – continuity or revolution? In other words, did Jewish history help or hinder Zionist life? The burden of the past was liable to break the back of the Jewish people and therefore what was needed was will to power and not the primacy of memory, life and not the book, a future orientation and not “pecking at the past”. What was wanted was a heroic history of a Nietzschean kind: Out of all of history he chooses certain exemplars, certain great types. He finds in history a few exalted individuals whom everything opposed, and yet they were victorious and rose up and prospered. They did not defer to their environment, to the time in which they lived, to the mighty of their generation, to the masses, to preconceptions, to accepted customs and manners, to accepted truths and ideas. In short, they truly rose above their time and place and did wonders.82 After the tragic phase and the historical phase, the Zeitlean Nietzsche embarked on his positivist phase. He abandoned Schopenhaurian metaphysics and Wagnerian music for the exact sciences. True to the message of his early essay, “Schopenhauer as an Educator”, he concluded that a disciple has to leave his master: “He has to take his own path”.83 Whereas Schopenhauer preached negation of the world and “denial of the will to live”, Nietzsche persisted in seeking “elevation, wholeness and growth”.84 If the Schopenhaurian pessimism was due to decadence, weakness, and sickness, the Greek pessimism derived from the will to power. As Wagner sang a “song of rejection and denial, annihilation of life and futility”, Nietzsche had to leave him when choosing the path of life: Some people call Nietzsche a “philosopher of culture”. This is not accurate according to an external understanding, but with regard to the inner intention there is some truth in it, and it would be closer to the truth if we said that Nietzsche was a philosopher of the elevation of life and its truth. And when Nietzsche saw that metaphysics and music did not lead to the elevation of life and its truth, he started to look for them in the exact sciences and positive scientific outlooks on the world.85

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka  69 Nietzsche championed positivism not as a scientific philosophical system that sanctioned life, but as a means of encouraging and increasing it. The usual positivist recognizes the facts of life as they are, but Nietzsche “never stopped criticising life, setting it in order, judging it, requiring it to have content and substance”. Likewise, when he drew near to the positivists, he continued to examine history not according to the happiness of the majority but through the actions of individuals, “the chosen of the human race”. When under the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner he saw the chosen only among great artists, but under the aegis of positivism he also began to see them among scientists, “among the eternal seekers . . . [of ] the knowledge of truth”.86 In his positivist period, a time when he exchanged the knowledge of art for the knowledge of science, Nietzsche was still of the opinion that life took precedence over both art and science. Sickness and the overcoming of sickness were central concerns in Nietzsche’s life and thought. Zeitlin, like other commentators, was impressed by Nietzsche’s audacity, “the victory of his bold spirit [. . .] the victory of his inner will”.87 But as well as overcoming his sickness, Nietzsche saw himself at those times as “raised above everything, high above everything [. . .] He was free”. He feared the idea that his sicknesses might cause him to hate life, and his fears drove him to the opposite extreme, an excessive optimism, building castles in the air, and his thinking could be summed up in the conclusion that “the sick have no right to be pessimistic”.88 Zeitlin, contemplating the sufferings of Nietzsche as a private individual, saw that his illness raised him up to heights as a thinker and poet as well: Sickness gave Nietzsche the capacity to isolate himself, to be with himself, to listen to the promptings of his heart, to understand its aspirations and feelings. His frequent scholarly work, his work as a teacher, his circle of intellectuals and associates, academic discussions, reading scholarly literature – these things took him out of himself.89 Isolation gave Nietzsche the capacity for introspection necessary for creativity and “the transvaluation of values”. The vicissitudes of his sickness increased his ability to understand and feel things and endowed him with tremendous concentration. It was precisely in difficult times that he wrote his books “that were a protest against pessimism, against romanticism, against metaphysics, against idealism”.90 The aphorisms of Human, All Too Human were a criticism of the received ideas and normative values of the preceding philosophers whose image of man was depicted as an eternal truth, a fixed state that did not change with the changing times. The philosophers, who lacked historical understanding, tended to think that man had a fixed form and was a product of unchanging circumstances. They believed they held the key to the riddle of the world and man, and therefore “a philosophy of history was now needed”.91 Zeitlin, however, did not shrink from strong criticism of Nietzsche when he slighted his metaphysical beliefs: “And one must tell the truth that Nietzsche too superficially dismisses all kinds of metaphysical perceptions and deep investigations into the eternal character of things”.92 Zeitlin’s religious mentality refused to accept a positivist approach that totally rejected the metaphysical dimension.

70  Nietzschean religious Jews In addition to his metaphysical criticism, Zeitlin also criticized Nietzsche’s ethical pronouncements, his total rejection of central ethical concepts like “sin”, “punishment”, “consolation”, “redemption”, and “compassion”. Nietzsche’s relativistic and utilitarian position with regard to good and evil was also considered, and Zeitlin came to the conclusion that the ideas expressed in Human, All Too Human were the contrary of those expressed in Nietzsche’s first books. In his early works, the artist was described as a prophet, a creator, and here the scientist was placed above him: although “there is great value in art, art has to be illumined by the light of true science”.93 The artist must develop a sense of proportion, control his impulses, subdue his will, emphasize clarity. Zeitlin thought that art, the jewel in the crown of The Birth of Tragedy, became the servant of science in The Gay Science. The final chapter in Zeitlin’s monograph, published in 1906, looked briefly at Nietzsche’s two essays, The Wanderer and His Shadow and Daybreak.94 The first essay discussed freewill, providing an analysis of the social and cultural contexts of sin, an examination of motives, and a consideration of the necessity of the act and the possibility of choice. The point at issue was this: If there is a profound reason for a sinful action, then the sin had to be committed and it should not be punished. And if there is no reason for a sinful action, then it is a meaningless act, an act without knowledge, without life, without purpose, an unintentional act, and it should not be punished either.95 Zeitlin criticized Nietzsche’s uncompromising stance in Daybreak, where he showed himself to be contemptuous of compassion, a position derived from the Greek philosophers, who considered it a weakness to show feelings of pity. Zeitlin preferred the Jewish tradition to the Greek one, and in this context, he also rejected Nietzsche’s criticism of sacrifice and other similar virtues. He was also skeptical of the Nietzschean criticism of progress. As we know, Nietzsche rejected the idea of progress on the grounds that one cannot make a value-judgment on a purposeless reality. The concept of utilitarian truth was also rejected, although Zeitlin adopted the Nietzschean interpretation of truth, a truth that is a constant undermining of all false constructions and illusions: The sentiment of truth which raises man to such a degree, liberates him from all preconceptions, customs and habits, from all characteristics and tendencies that are the products of the beast in man, from all social bondage, from all connection with any sect or party and so on, is acquired through enormous study, tremendous work on the soul, and especially through education.96

Nietzsche, Shestov, Zeitlin: do these three go together? What was the secret of the spell that Shestov cast over Zeitlin? Zeitlin explained that the Hassidim used the word ah-iin (nihil) in two ways: in a metaphysical sense close to that of the Buddhist “nirvana” and in an ethical sense  – that of

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka  71 a negation of values. Both senses were embodied in the Bratslav tsaddik who saw his disciple as the true ah-iin, the personification of nihilism, and in Zeitlin’s words efes ve-efes (nothing at all).97 This meant that he did not ascribe to himself the slightest importance. There was no one like Shestov, he said, who “discovered the hidden secrets of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche”, no one embodied Nietzschean nihilism in his personality as he did, exactly like that tsaddik: “Shestov gains all his achievements through the quality of ah-iin that is in him, through a negation of the yesh (being)”.98 Zeitlin did not shrink from praising the Russian-Jewish theological existentialist as the deepest of thinkers, the one who “took the work of Friedrich Nietzsche further”.99 Nihilism not only expressed Shestov’s personality but characterized his work, “the destruction of all the fortresses the human brain and human morality have constructed”. If the system of universal concepts upheld by reason falls, the system of values on which morality is based also collapses, resulting in “Destruction – destruction without end, total destruction, destruction that leaves nothing standing. Destruction down to the foundations, cataclysmic destruction”.100 The early Zeitlin, who combined Nietzscheanism with Hassidism, put his trust in the Übermensch, the man who doubted everything: “Friedrich Nietzsche delighted in his Übermensch, sought and found a new god [. . .]. Shestov went further; he did not need things to delight in”. Zeitlin set Nietzsche and Shestov against each other: I have put together Nietzsche the gaon (genius) and Shestov the feuilletonist and critic. That is really an unforgivable sin. But know that I have not desecrated the holy. The genius was a genius. The person who seeks only genius in Friedrich Nietzsche cannot read Shestov. Friedrich Nietzsche is able to bring out the splendor of every word, every aphorism. Shestov’s style is sometimes rough and unrefined. Friedrich Nietzsche is very rich in colors, shades, and music. Shestov lacks all this. Friedrich Nietzsche is a philosopher, poet, prophet. These qualities cannot be applied to Shestov. “Zarathustra is a poet, and like any poet he can lie”. Nietzsche can wax poetic; he can be bold or gentle. He is capable of both lightness and boldness. Shestov knows only the terrible truth and what lies behind the terrible truth. And indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche also knew one truth, and that was that “the true essence of a man is only revealed when he loses his talent”. Shestov does not have Nietzsche’s talent, but he has the “true essence”. Moreover, following in Friedrich Nietzsche’s footsteps, he went further than he did. He saw more, perceived more, and cried out!101 In appealing for Jewish renewal, Zeitlin saw himself as a Jewish Prometheus who called out, “Throw off your spiritual chains which have bound you for two thousand years!”102 Jewish renewal would not come from tradition or from the

72  Nietzschean religious Jews masses: “Shestov does not speak of God [. . .]. There is a great fear in his heart. He knows that his God is not that of the masses and not that of the philosophers, nor that of the poets”.103 Shestov, who feared those God was a word in their mouths that meant nothing, cried out like Nietzsche: not the cry of a despairing atheist but that of a believer who had been betrayed: “God is dead! You have killed him!”, cried Nietzsche. And perhaps he who does not have anything, he who has lost everything, he who is astonished and devastated by the things that are done, cannot help dreaming of that wondrous stranger . . . Who cried out: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”104 Shestov was an outstanding figure of the religious revival in Russia, and in his essay The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche (1900) he attacked philosophical idealism and rationalism and asserted that tragedy, evil and suffering are unavoidable. In his book Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy (1903), he said that both thinkers were alike in their attack on rationalism.105 After reading these books, Zeitlin declared that where Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy were concerned, No one went so deeply into every word that came out of the mouths of these three seekers of truth. No one approached their books with such tremendous love, with such penetrating insight, with such an acute power of analysis, and at the same time, with such admiration.106 The skepticism these three thinkers displayed towards the validity of reason, towards logical ways of thinking and the pretensions of the rationalistic philosophers was shared by Shestov himself. He communicated his doubts, hesitations, and criticisms to Zeitlin, who recognized his debt to the Russian-Jewish existentialist: If there is anyone in the world who has penetrated not only the true intention of every sentence and every word in the books of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but also the ultimate depths of their souls and the movements, turbulence and tranquility of their spirit in all the vicissitudes of their lives, that person is Lev Shestov.107 Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy lost faith in Schopenhaurian pessimism, but also in rational philosophical optimism. Shestov showed that they preferred artists and poets to systematic philosophers, as artists, like believers, broke through the barricades of reason and closed philosophical systems. The three thinkers exposed the nakedness of Western philosophy which presumed to solve the unsolved problems of humanity by reason. Philosophy bestows upon itself a supreme authority, but in Shestov’s opinion only faith is “the essential truth”, the objective truth

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka  73 found in the Holy Scriptures. The scientific undermining of biblical truth has no chance of succeeding because “the real truth” is only found in God. Shestov, who rescued Zeitlin from the totally critical attitude of Nietzsche and the skepticism of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, reached the conclusion that in all the beliefs and positive ideas of the creative spirits he loved, there was no revelation that was “not of this world”, although their great sufferings and total despair brought them to the brink of such revelation, and some of them peered into it.108 The main point in Shestov’s books, said Zeitlin, was the double conclusion reached by Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy: their hostility to all human ideals and their path of deliverance from this nihilism: Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy – all three of them peered at times into other worlds. Then Nietzsche perceived “eternal recurrence” (the recurrence was not the main thing here but the eternity); then Dostoevsky touched upon other worlds (Svidrigailov’s confession), then Tolstoy acknowledged that God’s commandments have to be observed in all their terrible stringency, and then he thought it fitting to speak of Abraham’s great sacrifice, but these precious moments passed and these great despairers began to make demands: this one for an Übermensch, that one for Pravoslavism and politics, and that one for a faith in the mind, as if he did not know that the great principle of faith in God is that it is beyond the human mind.109 In the genealogy he drew up, Shestov perceived an immanent discrepancy between philosophical truth and empirical truth. In contrast to philosophy’s search for absolute truth, the task of empirical truth is to act as a bridge between generations and values. But in the final analysis one cannot avoid contradictions, which are integral to life: “Truth is nourished solely by contradictions”. The philosopher who does not recognize these facts of life thinks that these contradictions can be overcome by means of logic, but in fact the “essential truth” cannot be logically defined. The individual, whose isolation is a characteristic he is born with, is caught between an awareness that he has to act in accordance with the limited values of truth and acting amorally. An eclectic and inconsistent choice is generally due to confusion, reflecting the permanent difference “between the condition of man who comes from dust and returns to dust, and God”. Under the  influence of Shestov, Zeitlin developed an original theological theory based on the difference between philosophy and religion. The starting-point of philosophy is “excitement”: that is, the organization of scientific categories of what is observed, while the starting-point of religion is “wonder”: that is, marveling at the cosmos and relying on God in the midst of life with all its contradictions. Philosophy goes from one stage to the next through a process of destruction of faith, hostility to ideals, and undermining of the law of causality. The criticism of Hume, Kant and Schopenhauer reached its conclusion in Nietzsche’s nihilization of normative

74  Nietzschean religious Jews values and Tolstoy’s negation of Western culture. The lack of a philosophical solution climaxed in Shestov who negated all human reason: absolute despair lays a path to absolute faith. Zeitlin set the Übermensch against God, claiming that Nietzsche intended the Übermensch as an answer to the petty and self-regarding principles of religion such as compassion and repentance. He found support for this claim in Shestov, who thought that Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy had reached the threshold of truth but did not penetrate it through lack of courage. Although Nietzsche, for instance, did right in destroying the old moral values, he erred when he began to prefer one to another: “What did Nietzsche come up with after his despair of all that is human?”,110 asked Zeitlin, and he answered – the Übermensch. The concept of the Übermensch had the pretension of placing him above other men, but this in fact was a momentary illusion: “Today you’re a king, tomorrow a slave; today a god, tomorrow a worm”. Zeitlin violently attacked the Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch which created gradations between men: “For what is the Übermensch if not a title and pedigree conferring privileges on someone who considers himself an aristocrat among simple folk?” In his opinion, Nietzsche was not the only one in the history of philosophy to give rise to human relativism: The whole history of morality and the whole history of philosophy are in large part a demand for superior strength and a demonstration of lineage. The Christians Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are in no way different in this from the hater of Christianity, Nietzsche.111 This is how Shestov formulated one of the strongest criticisms ever made of the Übermensch: Are rank, grade and pedigree everything in life? [. . .] Is not the true life – the life that is above man and gives content and value to life  – but a vain imagination that is useful and even essential at certain times, but harmful and dangerous and perhaps even more than that when the situation changes? Does not the true life, the life one desires, begin precisely when there is no first or last, righteous or sinners, geniuses or people without talent? [. . .] Is there no other power there which the hand of time is too short to cut off? A man can be good, wise, learned, talented or even a genius, but when he demands rights and privileges for these things, he loses both the goodness, the wisdom and the talent, and the greatest hopes of mankind.112 What exactly did Zeitlin find in the interpretations of Lev Isaacovitch Schwarzmann, alias Lev Shestov? There is no doubt that Zeitlin was very fascinated by Shestov’s commentaries on the Nietzschean-Russian synthesis. Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy all possessed what might be called a “heretical religiosity”, a phenomenon that on the one hand was distinguished by apostasy, skepticism, and total rejection of the values of Western culture, and that on the other hand provided an alternative in the form of a new kind of humanity or a Pravoslav religious

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka  75 revival. This nihilist-religious syndrome formed the basis of Shestov’s interpretations as also of the interpretations of Zeitlin himself. Zeitlin was particularly attracted by Shestov’s insight that philosophy cannot be separated from biography as a writer’s thought bears the imprint of the writer. This applied to Nietzsche and Shestov, and even more to Zeitlin.

“I was very thirsty” In 1910, Zeitlin published his article “Thirst”, in which, according to the scholar Shraga Bar-On, he sought “to describe once again in the spirit of Shestov Zarathustra’s ascent of the mountain and his descent from it with empty hands”.113 Zeitlin, like Nietzsche and Shestov, was an outstanding example of “heretical religiosity”, and, as in the case of the two others, contradictions did not deter him, and from his point of view, they were integral to existence: “The whole world is full of contradictions. Anyone who is faithful to the truth, to the world, to life itself, will necessarily find contradictions, even great contradictions [. . .] which cannot be explained”. True to this logic, Zeitlin expressed his opinion about Brenner’s heretical beliefs as follows: “A person who lives in this way must have God in his heart”.114 To this can be added the admission of Zeitlin himself that he came to a knowledge of God through Schopenhauer, Hartmann and Nietzsche, “on the face of it, complete and total heretics”.115 The scholar Rivka Schatz-Oppenheimer described Zeitlin as “a man who contained opposites”.116 And indeed, any attempt to describe Zeitlin’s theological biography in a linear fashion as a journey from heresy to faith will result in a one-dimensional analysis that disregards the complex, unique phenomenon of Zeitlin’s development  – a phenomenon that lies beyond religiosity and secularity. Attempts to make Zeitlin into an example of a return to religion can be found among some of his disciples and in the case of his son, who refused or were unable to accept his unusual interpretations. His disciple Simha Bunim Urbach insisted on saying that “after many errors and disappointments in the sphere of ancient and modern philosophical thought [. . .] he returned broken and dejected, tired and depressed, to the God of his fathers”,117 and the editors of Sefer Zeitlin (The Book of Zeitlin) also depicted him as returning to religion.118 A  few commentators have portrayed the route of Zeitlin’s theological development as a passage from the Übermensch to the Overgod.119 His son Aharon Zeitlin, who was largely responsible for promoting the idea of his father’s alleged “return to religion”, did a great deal to further it by means of corrections to Zeitlin’s works which he edited, and in this way distorted the account of an extraordinary theological progress. Even the scholar Asael Abelman, who stressed Zeitlin’s religious complexity, claimed that this complexity was a first stage in Zeitlin’s journey from heresy to faith.120 Berdichevsky got to the heart of the matter when he said, “His spirit and the promptings of his heart had no rest”.121 This insight is a good description of his essay “Thirst”, an object-lesson in Zeitlin’s attraction to Nietzsche. The subtitle of the essay, “A Vision of the Heart”, suggests prophecies and visions that come from within, and that are seen as an inner religious experience and not as a discovery

76  Nietzschean religious Jews following a transcendental revelation. Similarly, in Zeitlin’s essay Shechina, the prophecy bears a triple imprint: the imprint of God, the imprint of man in general, and “the imprint of the individual man, the prophet, the visionary”.122 Nietzsche’s fingerprints are also discernible in Shechina: parallel with the perception that man is made in the image of God, Zeitlin makes the bold statement that “man created God in his image; in the image of man he created Him; he created Him male and female”.123 The essay “Thirst” begins with the confession: “I lost my way. I searched for God. I asked the passers-by, Have you seen my God – God himself?”124 “Heretical religion”, from Augustine to Zeitlin, has generally taken the form of confessional literature.125 Although the confession was originally a religious genre beginning with Augustine in the fourth century – the record of a search for religious redemption ending with a revelation of the Messiah  – in modern times, confessions were secularized as in the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and became a reflective study of the author himself. Zeitlin’s confessions are a reflective exercise in self-­knowledge, the conscious reconstruction of a theological quest. As a form of personal genealogy, confessions are testimonies by the author to a process of selfdiscovery and self-creation. The seeker-confessant goes through several stations on his path of faith and heresy. The first station is the death of God à la Nietzsche, who is seen as a kind of Dionysian figure who shows the seeker the confusions of mythology, where the corpse of God is laid among the corpses of other gods: Your God is there too. We will fight against your God with Olympus, with all the gods, and then perhaps the end of all gods will also come upon him.126 The second figure to cross the seeker’s path is that of the scientist, a bald old man sitting in a laboratory, a caricature of Kant, who buried the gods of art, of alchemy, of idealism, of metaphysics, and the other shades of God. The scientist goes from grave to grave, from defeat to defeat, glances at the dust of God and looks at the masses of graves of all the saints of metaphysics lying there, “and under the heap was your former God”. The third figure, a poet, is a demiurge who creates a god with his breath and with the same breath empties him of life: There are no gods but me. I am the All. I create gods and destroy them: with my breath I  create them [.  .  .]. Sculpt yourself a god with your spirit and destroy it, and if this is painful, if this is bitter, sculpt yourself another god with your spirit seventy times more beautiful than the first.127 The poet lays before the seeker-confessant an objection in the style of all the modern vanquishers of God from Feuerbach to Marx. God, he says, is a product of the human consciousness and social manipulation which can be easily created and, if one so desires, negated. It is made and destroyed in the consciousness of the man

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka  77 who creates him. The fourth figure is a female disciple of Spinoza who promotes a romantic pantheism: “Why do you look for the God outside yourself and not for the God within? [. . .]. Your God can be seen in everything, and He is everything”.128 The remaining figures represent Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The first one, the Jew, is surprised at the seeker: “Why do you seek what is here?”, and tells him to return to the trustworthy sources revealed at Mount Sinai. The Christian sends the seeker to the son of God who dwells in the Church, and the Muslim directs him to “the God in the nearby mosque”. In an existential style, the seeker rejects these conventional theological solutions, as their representatives had not experienced the great rift: “They have not yet known great sorrow, they have not known the depths or the fear of hell”.129 But the seeker does not negate himself through apostasy, and he refuses to fall into the pit: “I will go and seek my God”.130 Thirsty for faith, he abandons men and sets out for the desert. Ascending a mountain near a flowing river, he becomes immersed in thought and looks at the people below: “They say, ‘There is a God’, ‘There is no God’, ‘God lives’ – Do they know what they are saying?” Zeitlin’s apostasy from Nietzsche’s apostasy is obvious here. Beyond the plane of “believers” and “heretics” Zeitlin remains thirsty, with a thirst that signifies not an emptiness but a lack: I was very thirsty. I will go down and drink of the clear waters of the river below. I will know the waters. I know what I am missing, I know what I long for . . . My soul was thirsty for God. I will go and look for him. But even before I was thirsty for him, I knew him. I know what I am missing, I know what my soul desires . . . Thirst does not know “there is’ or ‘there isn’t”. The thirsty man only knows what he is missing, and I will go and search for it. Even if I hear the prattle of contrarians saying, ‘there is no God’, my thirst for God will not cease. If there is no God outside me, he exists in my thirst. But the thirst is always for what is lacking, for something outside, and therefore even if God is within me and not outside me, I will always long for him as something dearer to me than my soul, and which lies outside my soul. He is at an infinite distance from me, and I must go forward and seek him all the days of my life.131 The seeker does not look for the God that is there, “but for the one that has not yet been found. I am not looking for the God of the world but the hidden God”.132 As in Nietzsche’s explanation of the birth of God from man’s fear, Zeitlin reveals the motives of the masses: “Their fear created their God”. Then the seeker leaves the God of the masses and turns to the God of the philosophers, but while the God of the masses is a living God capable of movement and love, the nakedness of God of the philosophers is exposed in the aridity of concepts and abstractions. He is “a dead or imprisoned God”.133 In addition to the god of philosophy, the other

78  Nietzschean religious Jews consolations to be found in the world – polytheistic paganism, aestheticism, scientific atheism, naïve romanticism, and all-inclusive pantheism – are also rejected. Because the “thing-in-itself” can never be revealed, man, according to philosophy, is doomed to be content with the world of phenomena, with emptiness, with “a god who is nothing”. Pantheism is shown to have lawless laws, laws without desire or love. The philosopher-poets claim that nature is a living thing, but it is actually ice cold, a cold machine devoid of human qualities. The seeker comes down from the mountain. In his vision, wandering souls go up to heaven and move around the temple of truth, a crystal temple to which the seeker wishes to go: “Please take me to this temple of crystal, for my soul has always longed to see it”.134 But this is an impossible undertaking, chiefly because of the believers, from whom redemption will not come. The “sinners” – the “religious heretics” as Nietzsche calls them – those who proclaim, “The death of God” and crown the Übermensch in His place, are those closest in spirit to the seeker Zeitlin. These, the sinners, also sought God and His truth and eternity with all their heart and soul, although they believed those who said, “God is dead”. And with bitter mourning for the God who had died and with a heart full of pain and longing for eternity, they made the Übermensch a god, and shed copious tears over him and covered him with their pains and longings, and put upon him all the splendour and all the beauty of the God that had died, and endowed him with absolute freedom, omnipotence and eternity. And seeing that the Übermensch was all that was holy, they each mistakenly said, “I myself am the Übermensch”. And since, being human and not God, they had a taste for lowness and vulgarity, limited aspirations and petty, stupid thoughts, they went after the lust of the moment, foolish ideas and vanities, believing that all that they did was very good.135 The sinners who boasted of being the Übermensch had split personalities. Although their outer being was immersed in mire and hubris, their inner selves aspired to “the sapphire throne”. It was precisely the heretics who proclaimed that “God is dead” that were able to reach the pure crystal temple, the shrine of truth, but even they could only touch the surface of the temple but not its inner parts, for fear of perishing. Like other human beings, they could not attain a pure faith and still remain “religious heretics”. The seeker awoke from his dream and continued to wander in his thoughts, reaching a far-Eastern type nirvana or a state of Schopenhauerian nihilism. In the theological tradition of ascent, Zeitlin the seeker declared, “I suddenly saw before me a high mountain and ascended it”.136 This recalls the ascent of the mountain in Daybreak, where Nietzsche wrote, “They ascend it and are disappointed”.137 Zeitlin observed that “even in the mountains there is no rest”.138 This resembles Moses’ ascent of Mount Sinai and his disappointment on coming down – a disappointment expressed in the breaking of the Tablets of the Law – Jesus’s “sermon on the mount” and Zarathustra’s descent from the heights to give his message to the masses.

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka  79

The Übermensch (overman) and the overgod In 1919, nine years after the publication of “Thirst” and 14 years after the publication of the monograph on Nietzsche, Zeitlin began his essay, “The Übermensch or Overgod?” (The Critique of Man), as follows: Some years ago, when I had still not found the gate to my world, I went astray and was lost in other worlds, in alien worlds. I was caught and mesmerized by the inner world of the Übermensch – Friedrich Nietzsche. I have left those worlds, I  have left them behind, I  have abandoned them, I  have shut their gates behind me. My soul now lives its own life, in which there is no room for all these poisonous questions that torment the souls of those who seek ways solely to the world, to nature, to the cosmos or to their “self”, but not to God. Seeking now the way to God, my heart does not return to these “accursed questions”, compelling though they may be.139 In the perspective of 48 years full of agonies of soul, self-education, temporary encampment in intellectual stations from Spinoza to Nietzsche and the search for a religious path suited to his nature, Zeitlin came to the conclusion that he had to leave the critical and skeptical stage in his life, “Nietzsche’s negative legacy”, and seek “the way to God”. The short essay begins in this fascinating way because Zeitlin took the same liminal path that Nietzsche did. Just as Nietzsche-Zarathustra “left behind all that was human and immersed himself in the superhuman”, so Zeitlin went “from the Übermensch to the Overgod”. If man for Nietzsche was a transitional stage to the Übermensch, for Zeitlin he was a transitional stage to a transcendental entity. In his survey of the philosophical and biographical landmarks of Nietzsche’s life, Zeitlin asserted that as a young man the German philosopher found the justification for life in art, but as a result of the Wagnerian distortion of metaphysics and romanticism, he began to find it in science. It was not the usefulness of science that attracted him, but the value and content that science gave to life, for the rationale of science is the search for truth. Quoting Lessing’s famous aphorism that if God gave him the truth, he would renounce it and be content with the desire to search for it, Zeitlin claimed that Nietzsche adopted this genealogical approach to both religion, metaphysics, and morality. In the intellectual climate of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concepts of sickness and health began to be used to probe cultural positions, as in Max Nordau. Nietzsche, said Zeitlin, “had a very religious and honest soul”, and wondered, “what was an isolated and sick person, abandoned by God and men, to do?”140 Would he come to the conclusion that he had no hope? “No”, answered Nietzsche’s religious feelings, “You have no right to do that”. The religious feelings that Zeitlin ascribed to Nietzsche are not surprising in view of the religious outlook of the Jewish Hassid. Nietzsche’s alienation from the early influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner was reflected, in Zeitlin’s opinion, in the revelations he made about his former teachers, “and so the sick and desperate Nietzsche, in

80  Nietzschean religious Jews accordance with an instinctive religious feeling, took his distance from Schopenhauer’s metaphysical system and Wagner’s romanticism”. Nietzsche’s shift from metaphysics to biology paved the way for scientific criticism, for the belief that “there is no absolute truth on earth, but only relative truths”. This early postmodernist assumption, also made by Berdichevsky, was also applied by Nietzsche to moral concepts that were seen as not valid in themselves, but only within their context. Zeitlin’s pre-postmodernist discussion of the significance of the Nietzschean revolution is still entirely relevant. On the one hand, there is Nietzsche’s moral relativism, and on the other hand the positivist approach that has “fixed beliefs, makes fixed laws”.141 Zeitlin had a problem with the postmodernist idea of the relativity of truth: If all truths are relative, I have my own relative truth which is the opposite of all accepted truths, and how will you prove that your relative truths are better than my relative truth? And here we come to the problem of truth itself. Who can prove that truth is better than falsehood? Truth is perhaps more useful and better for man, but when one gets beyond morality and does not care what is good and useful for man, what reason does one have to abandon falsehood and return to truth? “Scientific truth”. Why not imaginary truth? [. . .] Enslavement to the truth and sacrificing on its altar: what for? “Justifying life by finding the truth”. Why precisely by finding the general human truth and not the personal truth of a private individual?142 Zeitlin remained unconvinced by Nietzsche. If positivism rejects the a priori rationale of all basic assumptions, why is one not allowed to doubt its truths? And if certainty is based on physical experience, why would another empirical experience contradict the previous supposition? Why does man aspire to transcendental certainty and things that do not involve empirical experience? And why should one accept the scientific propensity to universal laws? “Why not wonderful dreams full of enchantment? Why not hopes and beliefs that are far beyond anything we generally imagine?”143 What were the reasons for Nietzsche’s critique of man and for his proposed replacement, the Übermensch? Following Shestov’s example, Zeitlin turned to biography in order to explain philosophy. After Nietzsche had to resign his professorship and his sickness worsened, he wrote his “healthy” books: Daybreak, Human, All Too Human, and others. Greatness, said Zeitlin, is not to be found in the health of a healthy man but in the health of a sick man. This was the principle of self-overcoming – “always to be master of oneself” – and in this way, said Zeitlin”, Nietzsche performed his special religious duty”. His “great health” had been necessary in order to be deeply pessimistic. In destroying the gods that preserved life, Nietzsche was able to return to the pessimism of tragedy which alone gave rise to creativity and elevation. This creativity was the impediment but also the motive-force of the transition from the positivist stage to Zarathustra. The scientific outlook that causes scholars to take a positive-positivistic approach found in

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka  81 Nietzsche the negative-critical dimension that enabled him to shatter the gods in his search for “self”. Zeitlin found a grain of truth in the perception of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Lev Shestov that there are only two periods in Nietzsche: a passive period of absorption and an active period of production. But this is not the whole truth. Zeitlin found many contradictions in Nietzsche’s work: for instance, Human, All Too Human keeps within the “human limit”, whereas Thus Spoke Zarathustra deals with a type that is beyond man, the Übermensch. At the same time, Zarathustra aspires not to a glorified man but to a higher species, in a relationship resembling that of a monkey to a human being. It is not a more exalted or higher type of man but a new anthropological being for whom the previous human definition was inadequate. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche does not speak as a scholar or a skeptic but as a visionary and a judge: “He speaks from the heavens above. He comes down to men from the mountains”.144 The change from Human, All Too Human to Thus Spoke Zarathustra was a change from the tragedy of science to the tragedy of life. This change had three characteristics: a justification of life solely through life itself, a ceaseless natural creation that finally produces a higher type; a radical positivism that gives birth to a philosophical pessimism, a position that rejects all accepted ideals; and a positivism meant from the beginning to be a means of liberation and a tool for the founding of a pessimism of heroism and creativity. To these philosophical, psychological, and sociological factors, Zeitlin added a physiological dimension, the components of which  – illness, isolation, and fear for himself  – distanced Nietzsche from “human” concerns and led him into a state of deep and sensitive inner consciousness. The years 1882 to 1889 – the years in which Nietzsche produced The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra – marked the transition from the period of sickness to the period of madness. Zeitlin ended his article with the following striking passage regarding the change that took place in Nietzsche from his early human preoccupations to the creation of a new anthropological strain beyond transcendental faith through an Overgod that produced an Übermensch in His image: But we, who know that the concept of the “Übermensch” is also “human, all too human” – just an echo of man’s desire to leave the context of the present, his hardships and sufferings, the narrow confines in which a cultured man necessarily finds himself – let us not set our hopes to find rest for our spirit on man but on what is truly above all men. We cannot believe in an Übermensch that a poet has created in his image. He is a man who because he has defaced his image of God sinks to the level of his small understanding and becomes lowly, small and repulsive. The healing for man is returning to his soul of souls, to God.145 Zeitlin’s call is a special case in the adoption of the heritage of the German philosopher by Jewish thought at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among students of the encounter of Nietzsche with the new Hebrew literature, there is a general belief that his acceptance took place among secular protagonists

82  Nietzschean religious Jews of Hebrew who turned their backs on a religious lifestyle, who rebelled against the form of life that the conservative society required of them, who called for a Europeanization of Jewish culture and who praised the sword and heroism. The Tse’irim, Hebraic Nietzschean intellectuals who gathered around the figure  of Berdichevsky, were strongly opposed to the cultural, traditional, and progressive type of nationalism that Ahad Ha-Am brought to the movement of national revival. From Berdichevsky and his circle, who proposed an opposed Nietzschean model to rabbinic Judaism, to the poetry of Shneur and Tchernikovsky, which sought a “Hebrew Hellenism”, the reception of Nietzsche at the turn of the century was an integral part of the broader process of the secularization and modernization of the Jews. Zeitlin challenged the Ts’eirim, who at a very early stage – already in 1898 – wished to break the umbilical cord that linked them to traditional Judaism, with a Nietzschean-Jewish synthesis to which he adhered all his life in various degrees, and which did not alienate the Hebrew God. Zeitlin was not the only religious thinker drawn to Nietzsche’s thought at the beginning of their career. Rosenzweig was also fascinated by the special quality of the philosopher of Zarathustra, but when he began to consider the content of the work he reached conclusions that caused him to repudiate Nietzsche’s thought. The common denominator of these two Orthodox thinkers was their initial attraction to Nietzsche’s heretical religiosity and their later rejection of his ideas and their dislike of the pretentiousness of the Übermensch and of the contradiction posed by the pagan Zarathustra to the transcendental Jewish God.

Notes 1 Jacob Fichman, “Introduction”, in Selected Writings, Vol. I, Warsaw 1911, I-XII [Hebrew]. 2 Zeitlin, “Good and Evil”, Selected Writings, 2, 1, 132. [Hebrew]. 3 Ibid., 133. 4 J.L. Nancy, “La thèse de Nietzsche sur la téléologie”, in Nietzsche aujourdhui, I; Intensités: II Passion, Paris 1973, 10–18. 5 Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”, Political Writings, Cambridge 1994, 310–311. 6 Walter Benjamin, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”, in Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt am Main 1971–1982, II, 179–202; first published in the Archiv für Sozialwissenscaft und Socialpolitik, 1920/1921. 7 Zeitlin, “Good and Evil”, 133. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 See especially, Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche – Life as Literature, Cambridge, MA 1985, 13–41. 12 Ibid., 134. 13 Ibid. 14 Justus Buchler, Nature and Judgement, New York 1966; idem., Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, New York 1966; idem., “Probing the Idea of Nature”, Process Studies VIII, 3 (1978). 15 Phillipa Foot, “Nietzsche – The Revaluation of Values”, in Robert C. Solomon, ed., Nietzsche – A Collection of Critical Essays, Bloomington 1980, 156–168; Kathrin P. Parsons, “Nietzsche and Moral Change”, op. cit., 169–193: John R. Dionne, Pascal et Nietzsche, New York 1965, 11–23.

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30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Zeitlin, “Good and Evil”, 136. Ibid., 135. Ibid. Ibid., 136. Ibid. Ibid., 137. Ibid. Ibid., 138. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 138. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 141. Zeitlin, “From the Writings of One of the Tse’irim”, Ha-Dor, 1 (1900–1901), numbers 24, 32, 33. [Hebrew]. Reprinted in Zeitlin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, part 1, “Thought and Poetry”, Warsaw 1911, 29–82; David Ohana and Robert Wistrich, Myth and Memory – The Metamorphoses of the Israeli Consciousness, Tel Aviv 1996, 269–289. [Hebrew]. Ahad Ha-Am, “Good Advice”, Ha-Shiloah, 1, 6, (1897). [Hebrew]. Reprinted in The Complete Works of Ahad Ha-Am, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem 1947, 132–134. Micha Josef Berdichevsky, “At the Crossroads: Open Letter to Ahad Ha-Am”, HaShiloah 1, 2, (November 1896), 154–159. [Hebrew]. For Berdichevsky’s opinion of Zeitlin, see Berdichevsky, “Hillel Zeitlin”, in The Writings of Micha Josef Ben-Gurion, Tel Aviv 1960, 154–159. Zeitlin, “From the Writings of One of the Tse’irim”, 35. Berdichevsky, “On Nature”, in At the Crossroads, Warsaw 1922, 14. Zeitlin, “From the Writings of One of the Tse’irim”, 35. Ibid. Ibid., 36. Ibid. On aesthetics in Zeitlin, see Asael Abelman, “The Yearning for Beauty: Aesthetics and Messianism in the Works of Hillel Zeitlin”, Huliot 10 (2006): 515–542. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 53. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 54. On Zeitlin himself, who said of Berdichevsky that “he aspires to total redemption”, – a continuous discourse on the Messianic idea – see Yaakov Meir, “The Hassidism to Come: Neo-Romanticism, Hassidism and Messianic Longings in the Works of Hillel Zeitlin”, Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, the Sorrow of the World and Longings for the Messiah, Jerusalem 2006, 9–39 [Hebrew]; Shraga Bar-Sela, “The Prophetic-Messianic Judaism of Zeitlin and His Path Towards It”, Daat 26 (1991): 109–124.[Hebrew]. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 60. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 1, 16. Zeitlin, “From the Writings of One of the Tse’irim”, 67. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 82. Ibid. Zeitlin, “Friedrich Nietzsche – His Life, Poetry and Philosophy”, 127. [Hebrew]. Ibid., “Introduction”, 128. Ibid., 1, 125. Ibid.

84  Nietzschean religious Jews

58 Ibid., 126. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 127. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 129. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 130. 66 Ibid., 131. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 3, 114. 69 Ibid., 116. 70 Ibid., 4, 122. 71 Ibid., 123. 72 Ibid., 119. 73 Ibid., 10, 398. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 400. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., 401. 78 Ibid., 402. See also D. P. Conacher, Euripidean Drama – Myth, Theme and Structure, Toronto 1967. 79 Zeitlin, “Friedrich Nietzsche, – His Life, Poetry and Philosophy”, 1, 407. 80 Ibid., 1, 416. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., 417. 83 Ibid., 414. 84 Ibid., 416. 85 Ibid., 417. 86 Ibid., 418. 87 Ibid., 9, 394. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., 395. 90 Ibid., 397. 91 Ibid., 10, 398. 92 Ibid., 399. 93 Ibid., 405. 94 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämliche Werke, Kritische Studienaugabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. Berlin 1999. 95 Zeitlin, “Friedrich Nietzsche – His Life, Poetry and Philosophy”, 11, 132. 96 Ibid., 135. 97 Zeitlin, “L. Shestov”, Ha-Me’orer, second year, 5 (1907): 177–178 [Hebrew]. See also Zeitlin, “On the Tremendous Drive of Lev Shestov”, Ha-Tekufa 20 (1923): 425– 444; 21 (1924): 369–379. [Hebrew]. 98 Zeitlin, “Friedrich Nietzsche – His Life, Poetry and Philosophy”, 11, 132. 99 Ibid., 178. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid., 172. 103 Ibid., 180. 104 Ibid. 105 See also his books translated into English: Lev Shestov, Speculation and Revelation, Columbus 1982; idem. Athens and Jerusalem, trans. Bernard Martin, Columbus

A Nietzschean Hassid taken to Treblinka  85 1966. On Shestov, see especially; Bernard Martin, Great Twentieth Century Jewish Philosophers  – Shestov, Rosenzweig, Buber, London 1970; A. Valevicius, Lev Shestov and His Times, New York 1993. 106 Zeitlin, “L. Shestov”, 372. [Hebrew]. 107 Zeitlin, “On the Huge Effort of Lev Shestov”, Ha-Tekufa, 20 (1923): 425–444; 21 (1924): 369–379. [Hebrew]. Reprinted under the title “Lev Shestov’s Search for God”, in Zeitlin, ed., Works – On the Frontier Between Two Worlds, Tel Aviv 1965, 69–102. [Hebrew]. The quotation here is from No. 21, 372–373. 108 Ibid., 373. 109 Ibid., 379. 110 Ibid., 374. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid., 376. 113 Shraga Bar-On, “The Thirst of Hillel Zeitlin: ‘Seekers of God’ as a State of Belief in the Literature of the Hebrew Revival, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought, 22 (1980): 638 [Hebrew]. 114 Zeitlin, “Josef Chaim Brenner: Values and Memories”, Ha-Tekufa 14–16 (1922), 617. [Hebrew]. 115 On the relationship between Zeitlin and Brenner, see Yonatan Meir, “The Ardent Desire for the Shehina; a Clarification of the Relationship Between Rabbi Kook, Hillel Zeitlin and Josef Chaim Brenner”, The Way of the Spirit, Jubilee Book for Eliezer Shchweid, Jerusalem 2005, 771–818 [Hebrew]; Hamutal Bar-Yosef, “What Did Josef Chaim Brenner Receive From Hillel Zeitlin?” in Avner Holtzman and others, eds., Around the Dot: New Studies on M.J. Berdichevsky, J.C. Brenner and A.D. Gordon, Sede Boker 2008, 175–186. [Hebrew]. 116 Rivka Schatz-Oppenheimer, “Hillel’s Path to Jewish Mysticism”, Kivunim 3 (1979): 81–91 [Hebrew]. 117 S.B. Urbach, The History of One Soul: Hillel Zeitlin, the Man and His Teaching, Jerusalem 1943, 7. [Hebrew]. 118 Yishiyahu Wolfsburg and Zvi Harkaby, eds. The Book of Zeitlin, Jerusalem 1944. [Hebrew]. 119 Shraga Bar-Sela, Between the Storm and the Quiet: The Life and Works of Hillel Zeitlin, Tel Aviv 1999 [Hebrew], 128; Yaakov Golomb, “Hillel Zeitlin: From the Superman to the Supreme God, or From Nietzsche to the Zohar”, Daat 56 (2005): 135–151. [Hebrew]. 120 Asael Abelman, “In the Imbroglio of Faith and Heresy: On the Beginnings of Hillel Zeitlin’s Spiritual Path”, Kabbala 16 (2007), 129–150. [Hebrew]. 121 Berdichevsky, “Hillel Zeitlin”, 225. 122 Zeitlin, “Shechina”, Sifrut, 1, Warsaw 1908, 69. [Hebrew]. Reprinted in: On the Frontier Between Two Worlds, 113–126. The reference here is to p. 69. 123 Ibid. 124 Zeitlin, “The Thirst; The Heart’s Vision”, Sifrut 4 (1910): 141–160 [Hebrew]. 125 David Ohana, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the First Modern Man”, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, Jerusalem 1999, 580–603. [Hebrew]. 126 Zeitlin, “The Thirst”, 165. 127 Ibid., 126. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid., 167. 130 Ibid. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid., 167–168. 133 Ibid., 168. 134 Ibid., 170.

86  Nietzschean religious Jews 135 Ibid., 173. 136 Ibid., 175–178. 137 Nietzsche, Daybreak. 138 Zeitlin, “The Thirst”, 180. 139 Zeitlin, “Superman or Supreme God”, On the Frontier of Two Worlds, 14. [Hebrew]. 140 Ibid., 53. 141 Ibid., 54. 142 Ibid. 143 Ibid., 55. 144 Ibid., 67. 145 Ibid., 68.

4 Zarathustra faces Mount Sinai

Hegel – god within history Franz Rosenzweig’s stop at the station of Nietzsche on his philosophical journey was connected to his move from a systematic, rational, idealist philosophy to an existential, pragmatic, and religious way of thinking. Like Kirkegaard in his revolt against Hegel and Nietzsche in his against Schopenhauer, Rosenzweig focused on the philosopher rather than the philosophy, on the individual rather than the system, on reflection rather than on omniscient reason. Rosenzweig’s acknowledgment that his perception of the metaphysical God derived from Nietzsche led him to the conclusion that Nietzsche was a thinker one had to reckon with because he saw God face-to-face, and not because he denied him.1 The year 1913 was the turning-point in Rosenzweig’s life and thought when he made two decisions in one radical step: he abandoned historicism with his renunciation of the Christian faith, and he embraced philosophy with his return to Judaism. This dual action was connected with his rejection of Hegel’s philosophy on which he had written the two volumes of his dissertation, Hegel and the State, under the guidance of Friedrich Meinecke, a work he completed in 1913.2 Rejecting the Hegelian theodicy  – history as “God’s action on earth”  – in which the spirit of liberty increases with the progress of history from one stage to the next, he claimed that whereas in Herder history was part of God’s plan, “in Hegel he comes into being within it”.3 Already in 1910, he spoke in a letter to Hans Ehrenburg about “Hegel’s religious intellectualism”: We refuse to see “God in history” because we do not wish to see history (from the religious point of view) as a picture or an entity. We see God in every moral occurrence [. . .]. If history is divine, then every action placed into that receptacle is divine and consequently justified. For Hegel, the divinity of history was a “justification of God”.4 Rosenzweig was very critical of Hegel’s position, of the fact that he made God completely redundant and that history itself became the central issue, and not divine Providence. Hegel radicalized the conception of history in an attempt to decipher its laws: the rational and the irrational, reason and affectivity, thesis and

88  Nietzschean religious Jews antithesis  – all of them formed part of the “cunning of reason” whose dialectic drives the historical process along. Only at the onset of darkness is history revealed in its nakedness like the owl of Minerva, which appears at nightfall. Once the historical process is played out, man is able to decipher its logic hidden beneath a mass of events that apparently took place without any connection between them. Hegel’s concept of progress was the optimistic and presumptuous idea of a rational humanity which improves with the passage of time. This revelation in the time-dimension is one of the revelations of the spirit, and the phenomenon of progress is thus manifest in history. Hegel’s famous saying that “the rational is the real and the real is the rational” has a dual meaning: whatever is rational is bound to materialize in reality, and reality, by the very fact of its being real, is the proof of its rationality. The essence of the Hegelian dialectic is finally seen to be the wish for human reason to be divine, to grasp history in its entirety and even to guide it. Rosenzweig’s letters and diaries reveal a desire to expose the historical and ideological presumptuousness of Hegel, whose system he declared “harmful”.5 He felt that Hegel was too transparent, lacking in contradictions. He described himself as “anti-Hegelian”. Although he greatly admired Hermann Cohen, whom he saw as a Jewish theologian, he admitted that “I couldn’t take the Hegelian in him”. To his friend and cousin Gertrude Oppenheim, he pointed out that he was writing about Cohen’s system on Hegel’s birthday: “Too bad [.  .  .] I  will only refrain from hurting  .  .  . Nietzsche and Kant”.6 Above all, contrary to Hegel’s whale of a dialectic that swallowed the individual without knowing what it had done, Rosenzweig saw the individual as directly redeemed by God. At the same time, however, Hegel’s influence was to be seen in the philosophical architectonics of The Star of Redemption: the Hegelian trinity of paganism, Christianity, and Judaism appears in Rosenzweig as the trinity of creation, revelation, and redemption, and the trinity of God, man, and world. From the Hegelian idealism based on essential reason, Rosenzweig turned to what Moshe Schwartz calls “the theology of the experience”, which its proponents philosophized about on a personal basis.7

Live philosophers Rosenzweig addressed himself on four particular skeptical philosophers for whom reason was not central to their philosophy: Friedrich Schlegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1913, Rosenzweig discovered in the State Library in Berlin a Schelling manuscript wrongly ascribed to Hegel. In this document, Schelling combined a “rational monotheism”, signifying an abstract intellectual unity, with a “polytheism of imagination”, signifying a relative historical multiplicity.8 This philosophical revelation had a central role in Rosenzweig’s philosophical development: “Schelling always puts me in a state of mind of skepticism and undermining, but he nevertheless resembles me, and I am indebted to him”.9 If Schelling wished to formulate a “rational mythology”, Schopenhauer created a nihilistic myth of existence. Schopenhauer’s starting-point was the despair that reached its climax in Kant, a despair that permitted reason to attain a knowledge of

Zarathustra faces Mount Sinai  89 reality-in-itself. The separation of reality from rational knowledge opened up two opposite directions: Hegel and Schopenhauer. Hegel’s pretension was to know reality by rational means, while Schopenhauer in his despair enveloped himself in the veil of maya and an attitude of despondency. Schopenhauer’s most famous work, The World as Will and Idea (1819) showed that his radical idealism was not only the nihilistic Western counterpart of the Buddhist “nirvana” but that his nihilism was an autonomous position at the heart of Western culture. Schopenhauer claimed that the annulment of the will-to-live was only seen negatively as nothing was known about it because no one had experience of it. For the man who was still in the world, nirvana was a kind of “nothing”. Rosenzweig condemned this idea, with which Schopenhauer’s book ended, saying it was a “futile idea”, a view that was not enlightening but was a sort of pale echo of Buddhist concepts.10 Also, the idealistic statement that “God is truth” was meaningless, as in Rosenzweig’s opinion “the question of ‘what God is’ is an impossible one”. But the personal philosophizing in The World as Will and Idea was what fascinated the writer of The Star of Redemption.11 The attack on Hegel’s philosophy, said Rosenzweig, “happened in the philosophical period that begins with Schopenhauer, continues via Nietzsche, and whose end has not yet arrived”. In Schopenhauer, man as the “Lord of creation” was still able to redeem the world from the veil of maya by means of an aesthetic approach. In Kierkegaard, however, the aesthetic path was only one aspect of the whole, and there was also the ethical path and the religious path, and one went from one to the other by a kind of leap. The greatest leap was that to the religious path, in which one recognized the impotence of man in the face of divine omnipotence. With regard to the sacrifice of Isaac, Rosenzweig claimed that Abraham was not, as Kierkegaard asserted, an exemplar of faith, the individual who effaces himself before God, but the father of the Jewish people, a universal figure and a vanguard in relation to the peoples of the earth.12 The Archimedian point was the shift from an objective, rational approach, as in Hegel to man’s consciousness of self, his “consciousness of his sin and redemption”, as Rosenzweig aptly described Kierkegaard’s message.13 Rosenzweig set Kierkegaard’s religious existentialism against the secular existentialism of Nietzsche: The history of philosophy had not beheld an atheism like Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche may not negate God, but he is the first thinker who, in the theological sense of the word, very definitely “denies” him or who, more precisely still, curses him. For that famous proposition: “If God existed, how could I bear not to be God?” is as mighty a curse as the curse with which Kierkegaard’s experience of God began.14

Nietzsche – “a real human being” Nietzsche used history as a starting-point for a reorientation of philosophy, which had established itself as a philosophy of deceit: in his radical investigation and

90  Nietzschean religious Jews in the genealogy of his fundamental concepts, man had discovered that the idols which he himself had created – God, morality, reason, truth – were revealed as a broken reed and as a golem that turned on its maker. Nietzsche was the genealogist of human history who revealed the naked values as he saw them: as superstructures, narcotic drugs, or energy pills that gave taste and purpose to a world which had no taste or purpose.15 Nietzsche looked at nihilism as it was and diagnosed history in its nakedness. Historical man discovered that his God was an image that man had created with his own hands out of self-protection, reason was  deceptive and a falsification of the evidence of the senses, morality, all in all, was institutionalized habit, and objective truth was not possible. Historical man was naked, a leaf tossed in the wind. Disillusioned with theology and disappointed with progress, he was suddenly conscious of the gaping chasm which threatened to swallow everything up. Nihilism lay at the door. This is what Rosenzweig wrote, The first real human being among the philosophers was also the first who beheld God face to face – even if it was only in order to deny him. For that proposition is the first philosophical denial of God in which God is not indissolubly tied to the world. To the world Nietzsche could not have said, “If it existed, how could I bear not to be it?” The living God appears to the living man. It is with a consuming hatred that the defiant self views divine freedom, devoid of all defiance, which drives him to denial because he has to regard it as licence – for how could he otherwise bear not to be God? God’s freedom, not his being, drives him to this self-assertion; he could laugh off God’s being even if he believed in it. Thus the meta-ethical, like the meta-logical before it, disposes of the metaphysical within itself and precisely thereby renders it visible as divine “personality”, as unity, and not like the human personality as unicum.16 Nietzsche, for Rosenzweig, personified the philosopher-as-a-human-being, the philosopher as a private person, and only as that, as an individual, without a philosophical system and without a conceptual mask, could he look God in the face, even if it was only in order to decide that he does not exist. Nietzsche goes beyond a conception of nihilism based on values to an ontological, essential nihilism, or, as Martin Heidegger put it, “Nought and nothing [. . .] are concepts of essence and not of value”.17 Nietzsche’s revolutionary quality – and here Rosenzweig had a good perception of the nature of the intellectual revolution that Nietzsche brought about in Western culture – consisted of giving nihilism an ontological perspective, in that nothingness no longer denoted a denial of the existing order, the lack or the contrary of being, but belonged essentially to being as such. Essential nihilism attained significance when a leap to a transcendental foothold that gave an apparent significance to the vale of tears was denied. Moreover, the metaphysical significance found an anchor in the nihilistic recognition that behind nothing there is nothing, and this has to be accepted as it is. Nietzsche’s metaphysical nihilism is rooted in the here-and-now, and its significance is not a denial of morality, not

Zarathustra faces Mount Sinai  91 a denial of the meaning of the world, not eternal recurrence in its Stoic form or in that of Ecclesiastes, but a bold apprehension of being as nothingness, a penetrating gaze into the nihilistic face of God.18 Wherein, in Rosenzweig’s opinion, did Nietzsche’s uniqueness lie? For only here was it really something new. Poets had always dealt with life and their own souls. But not philosophers. And saints had always lived life and for their own soul. But again – not the philosophers. Here, however, was one man who knew his own life and his own soul like a poet, and obeyed their voice like a holy man, and who for all that was a philosopher. What he philosophized has by now become almost a matter of indifference. Dionysius and Superman, Blond Beast and Eternal Return – where are they now? But none of those who now feel the urge to philosophize can any longer by-pass the man himself, who transformed himself in the transformation of his mental images, whose soul feared no height, who clambered after Mind, that daredevil climber, up to the steep pinnacle of madness, where there was no more Onward. [. . .] For the great thinkers of the past, the soul had been allowed to play the role of, say, wet nurse, or at any rate of tutor of Mind. But one day the pupil grew up and went his own way, enjoying his freedom and unlimited prospects. He recalled the four narrow walls in which he had grown up only with horror. Thus mind enjoyed precisely its being free of the soulful dullness in which nonmind spends its days. For the philosopher, philosophy was the cool height to which he had escaped from the mists of the plain. For Nietzsche this dichotomy between height and plain did not exist in his own self; he was of a piece, soul and mind a unity, man and thinker a unity to the last.19 It was this unity of Nietzsche, the total philosopher, that fascinated Rosenzweig. Nietzsche turned from historicism to myth, from reason to experience, from the pursuit of truth to the building of living culture, from the general to the unique, from the objective to the perspective, and from an optimistic belief in progress to a cyclical concept of history. The significance of Nietzschean myth lay in its fundamental assumption of the ability of the individual to create a world in his own image, and in this way to establish a correlation between modern man and his modern world not through rational processes, but by means of a new myth: “Without myth, every culture loses the healthy power of its creativity: only a horizon defined by myth completes and unifies a whole cultural movement” [BT, 23]. One could say that Nietzsche, as the representative of a new type of philosopher, became a philosophical myth for Rosenzweig. Nietzsche was the first thinker to establish a clear distinction for the modern age between philosophers who focused on truth, logos, and the objective, and philosophers who focused on culture, mythos, and perspective. This had hitherto been the distinction between philosopher and artist, but Nietzsche’s originality created a bridge between them, for by constructing a new myth the philosopher became a maker of culture. Alfred Weber pointed out that each culture is expressed in a

92  Nietzschean religious Jews certain myth;20 Spengler predicted that a new culture would emerge wherever a myth is created;21 and Burckhardt described the Faustian myth of modern European culture.22 While the traditional philosopher or intellectual looked backward, like the owl of Minerva, in order to preserve an objective opinion, the new intellectual dwelt in the eye of the storm and created reality ex nihilo. Where Plato sought a philosopher-king who would unite reason and power, Nietzsche sought a philosopher-artist who would unite aesthetics and philosophy. The innovation of the “anti-intellectual” intellectuals was their desire to recreate chaos; in their opinion, it was only in a state of conflict that man could create aesthetic myths for the modern world. This “myth ex nihilo” was not a part of reality but a fruit of the imagination, an aesthetic creation, a self-created consciousness that annihilated the universality of western culture. For Rosenzweig, it was not the content of Nietzsche’s philosophy that was important – the distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, the Übermensch, eternal recurrence  – but Nietzsche’s wonderful image, the spiritual adventurer who climbed beyond the mountains of reason until he came hurtling down into insanity. If Rosenzweig did not look for the union of life and philosophy in Nietzsche, Nietzsche himself had a full appreciation, in the case of his great rivals like Socrates and Jesus as well, of an authentic interrelationship between biography and outlook. The criterion by which he judged the greatness of these figures was the amount of truth they conveyed.23 The hallmark of the stature of a great figure was the amount of history he could absorb without it harming the vitality of his personality and his capacity to adapt his historical consciousness to his life in a way that strengthened it. Socrates, Raphael, Spinoza, and Goethe were examples of great figures. Although he was scornful of rationalism and Christianity, Nietzsche admired their representatives Socrates and Jesus on account of the personal price they paid for their ideas and the authenticity of their lives and beliefs.

From perspectivism to revelation Nietzsche, according to Rosenzweig, was a philosopher who knew how to ask historical questions. In his diary on February 29, 1908, he wrote the following apparently paradoxical sentence: “Nietzsche was a terrible philosopher simply because he was a good historian”.24 The famous historian Jacob Burkhardt agreed with him when he wrote to Nietzsche in 1882, “Basically, it is clear that you always teach history”.25 Nietzsche’s historical perspectivism was formed by Jacob Burkhardt’s lectures, which he heard in Basle in 1870, and by his opposition to the objectivity claimed by Hegel, as a philosopher of history, and by Leopold von Ranke as a historian. Nietzsche brought a breath of fresh air into the historiographical climate of opinion, which began with a religious belief in the operation of the divine intelligence and ended with the secular challenge of gaining an objective knowledge of history through scientific methods (i.e., historicism). Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801) meant by “historicism” the manifestation of human nature

Zarathustra faces Mount Sinai  93 through a study of its historical development and of attempting to predict the course of history by accumulating knowledge. The poverty of historicism was challenged, before Karl R. Popper, in the debate that took place at the beginning of the Enlightenment. On the one hand, the Swiss philosopher Issak Iselin (1728–1782) maintained in 1764 that Providence predetermined the purposes of history, and on the other hand, Johann Gottlieb Herder stated in 1774 that history was the chronicle of the actions, forces, and tendencies of human beings in relation to their time and place. However, history as a whole was planned by divine Providence according to a comprehensive purpose, the realization of Humanität. In another debate on the question, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) engaged in disputation with Gotthold E. Lessing (1729–1781). In 1780, Lessing said that revelation could be compared with the process of education: what education is for the individual, revelation is for the human race. Mendelssohn could not accept that the aim of Providence was the progress of the human race, and he considered the progress of the individual alone. In 1784, the year of publication of Herder’s first book, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Kant wrote his article on history. According to Kant, human culture arose as a consequence of “ungesellige Geselligheit” and the cause of history was man’s need to have a master who would compel him to subordinate his own will to that of the master. This problem found its solution in war. The purpose of history, however, was to create a league of nations that would guarantee man’s freedom. To Voltaire’s pessimistic conclusion in Candide, “Plus ça change, et plus c’est la même chose”, Kant replied with a meaningful concept of history which promoted liberty, reason, and morality. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1782–1814) went a step further: he claimed that the progress of man was accompanied by a corresponding progress in thought and that each historical period represented a new stage in human thinking.26 Schelling (1775–1854) held that history was the proof of the reality of God, and its purpose was to create a world-wide system of government. G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) radicalized the concept of history and expected it to end in his time. According to him, the rational and the irrational, reason and instinct, thesis, and antithesis all dialectically promoted the purposes of history. In the Hegelian theodicy, theological tradition and the rational challenge were interfused. Hegel’s philosophical system marked the end of traditional history. At the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, the historians in Germany took the place of the philosophers, and historiography dealt with matters previously treated by philosophy. Nietzsche rejected the historical tradition accepted in the nineteenth century and proposed a “historical perspectivism”.27 His main purpose was to destroy the notion that the historical past taught some single truth, proved some general concept, or constituted a universal key. In his view, as in that of Burckhardt, there were as many truths to the historical past as there were individual perspectives. People had to look at history according to the motivation of life and not as a rational oracle, objective compass, or moral beacon. Objective history was not a possibility. If history was no more than a means for the individual interpretation of each person, who drew his conclusions from it, used it for his own purposes and received from

94  Nietzschean religious Jews it support for his own conceptions, then all the projections cast upon historicism by the Enlightenment and romanticism fell away. The concept of “progress” dear to the philosophy of the eighteenth century and which developed the historiography of the nineteenth century was only the tip of the iceberg. By demolishing the preconceptions of God, morality, rationality, and truth, Nietzsche tried, with his “philosophical hammer”, to expose the concept of progress in its theological nakedness. Historicism was revealed as a “historical fever” ravaging culture. What characterized the old idealistic philosophy “from Ionia to Jena”, said Rosenzweig, was its one-dimensionality.28 The contradictions, the counter-­ arguments, the paradoxes were missing  – everything that creates a living philosophy, everything that reflects an outlook suited to a dynamic life not subject to restraints and not bound by a depressing conceptual system. What was lacking in Hegel’s system was “the ever-multiple appearance of being”.29 In order that philosophy should not come to the end of its path with its pessimistic conclusions and in order that it should “proceed another step beyond this crag without plunging into the abyss, we have to change the fundamentals and a new concept of philosophy must arise”.30 The answer here would seem to be the new philosophy of the Nietzschean school of thought, a Weltanschauung, a refreshing interpretive approach, the viewpoint of an individual narrative, “the idea with which an individual mind reacts to the impression which the world makes on it”. The attack on the old philosophy “happened in the philosophical period that begins with Schopenhauer, continues via Nietzsche, and whose end has not yet arrived”.31 The answer to the scientific method that requires objectivity, unity, and generalization would be “philosophizing by means of aphorisms” – an obvious reference to Nietzsche – multi-dimensional thought that promotes a multiplicity of outlooks and a variety of perspectives. Only such a new philosophical outlook would make philosophizing possible in the post-Hegelian era. In place of “the old type of philosopher, impersonal by profession, a mere deputy of the naturally one-dimensional history of philosophy”, one would have “the philosopher of the Weltanschauung, the point of view”.32 But Rosenzweig had his doubts about this new philosophy also and thought one had to ask whether a perspectivistic philosophy of this kind, which is not systematic, is at all possible. Was a postmodernist philosophy of this kind “still science”?33 To use Karl Popper’s terminology, the Nietzschean (and Frankist) method could not be refuted because the validity of the refutation itself was questioned. Nietzsche claimed, “It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable” (BGE, 18). It was not the dynamic reality with its contrasts and contrary tendencies, but reason that could not bear an inner contradiction. In this disharmonious universe, there was no parallel between existence and thought, and Nietzsche, in his attack on Parmenedes, claimed, as we have seen, that there is no general and fixed truth but only perspectivistic viewpoints. General truths are only instrumental and do not give an objective picture of the world, because an objective structure does not exist. In place of absolute rational knowledge and philosophical thought with its pretensions of providing an objective explanation of the universe, Nietzsche offered a perspectivistic explanation (BGE, 34).

Zarathustra faces Mount Sinai  95 According to Kant, without the status of reason, the Copernican revolution would not have taken place and there could not have been any categorical imperative. According to Nietzsche, however, the attributes of a lawgiver belonged to a philosopher and not to reason, to an individual and not to a method. This represented a personalization of philosophy and of the idea of reason. The legislation of a philosopher, thought Nietzsche, was his creation. The philosophers until then had interpreted or wished to change the world, but Nietzsche said that the truly courageous act would be to accept the meaninglessness of the world. According to Nietzsche, the philosophers were slaves to preconceptions and were conditioned by certain cultural attitudes. It followed, then, that every philosophical position was relative to a given historical-cultural situation. Here one may ask how Nietzsche defined his own philosophizing, for here we seem to have a tautology. Nietzsche claimed that his philosophical position did not contradict the principle of perspectivism because his method was an “experimental philosophy” and also a personal (Nietzsche’s) perspective. Nietzsche did not fit the rational criterion that traditional philosophy set for itself in the law of logos – namely, that of self-contradiction.34 But Rosenzweig could not bring himself to accept the “anarchical” Nietzschean perspectivism, which in his opinion lacked “the philosophical aspect or the scientific aspect”. This new philosophy had no point of support. It was trapped in an impasse, a no-through road, because it depended on its opposition to objectivity. “Thus, its support”, he said, “must come from another source”.35 Only an original system of thought could save the perspectivistic philosophy, which was “the most extreme subjectivity” and “at the same time achieve the objectivity of science”.36 The solution lay in religious existentialism, which in his opinion was the only bridge between blind and deaf egoism towards others and the lucid clarity of objectivity. Rosenzweig’s fear concerning the Nietzschean type of philosophy, and in fact concerning his own philosophy as well, was that denial of the rational basis of philosophy would cause the ground to give way beneath the objectivity of truth. The Nietzschean conclusion is that objective truth, like a normative morality, is not a possibility. The elimination of the pair of concepts “truth” and “falsehood” does not eliminate the truth for Nietzsche any more than the elimination of “good” and “evil” eliminates the good [WP, 12]: Nietzsche only questions the right of certain people (the majority in a decadent situation) to determine the “objective” significance of this pair of concepts. Nietzsche removed the concepts “good” and “truth” from the traditional normative context and evaluated them according to modern criteria of power, intensity, and authenticity. Where, then, can one place the Nietzschean concept of truth in the philosophical tradition? All the philosophies tried to search for absolute truth: in Descartes, one has “cogito ergo sum”, in Spinoza, pantheistic totality, in Kant, transcendental unity. Nietzsche, however, claimed that certain conditions of existence determined certain forms of life. These forms of life required certain forms of knowledge. In the Nietzschean epistemology, Nietzsche rejected the intellect and its norms [WP, 473]. If the intellect was rejected, the norms of the intellect, truth, and morality

96  Nietzschean religious Jews were also rejected. Kant thought that there were norms in the moral dimension, and he widened them to include the cognitive sphere. The assumption that there was knowledge was parallel to the assumption that there was morality: this was Kant’s method according to Nietzsche, who called for the mask to be removed. Faith, in Nietzsche’s view, was a psychological problem, just as positions, truths, values, and norms were also projections [WP, 530]. Likewise, scientific or moral beliefs were not different, from the point of view of their validity, from religious or political beliefs. In the cognitive sphere, Nietzsche shifted truth from the objective to the perspectivistic, and, in the moral sphere, the norm was rejected in favor of power manifested in individual creativity. Rosenzweig called the third and last book of The Star of Redemption, the crown of his monumental work, “The Star, or the Eternal Truth”. The work begins with a private individual living with the consciousness of death, a secular individual with an “outlook on life”. But the purpose of the “New Thinking” and the aim of the revelatory book was by linking philosophy to theology to find an absolute truth, not a relative or personal one. Revelation exposes the individual to his Maker through a dialogical experience in which he receives the love of God. This experiential theology represented man in face of God in the act of revelation as the most grounding and significant of human experiences. Absolute truth is revealed in the experience of revelation, in contrast to pagan relativity. In adopting Hermann Cohen’s argument in his Religion of Reason that “by the concept of truth we indicate the concept of God [. . .] truth is the essence of God”,37 in promoting a God of ideas, Rosenzweig stressed the reality of God. If revelation in Cohen emphasized the rational, true, and ethical nature of God, in Rosenzweig it is seen as an act of pure love, an erotic, not a symbolic act, a mutual dialogic affinity. Rosenzweig said that one should not deny the reality of truth. Truth is a priori because its source is God’s essence: “Truth is from God, God is its origin. If truth is illumination, then God is the light whence springs the illumination [. . .] God is himself the lucid light which elucidates the truth”.38 The characteristics of God are the inclusive unity of the All, light and truth. Rosenzweig nevertheless asks, “Truth – what is it?”, and the scholar Yehoyada Amir explains, Nietzsche already answered this question in his provocative way, saying, let us assume that truth is a woman – and so? Is there no basis to the suspicion that all the philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatic, did not understand women?39 There is a chasm between the answers of these two existentialists, but the search for truth, whatever its interpretation, was common to both. If in Hegel objectivity embodies the truth, and if in Nietzsche subjectivity is the essence of truth, Rosenzweig declares that “God is truth”.40

Zarathustra as a figure In the introduction to the third part of The Star of Redemption, Goethe and Nietzsche are set off against each other. Goethe, who was a lifelong idol-worshiper, goes up

Zarathustra faces Mount Sinai  97 to the edge of the abyss but does not enter it. Like his hero Faust, he was challenged by fate but escaped unharmed: “Let someone match it if he can!”41 These words of Goethe, regarded by Nietzsche as one of the ideal meta-historical figures, are quoted by him in support of the Nietzschean approach that demands a form of history that intensifies life: “I hate anything that merely adds to my knowledge without increasing or stimulating my actions” [H, Introduction]. The common denominator between Goethe and Nietzsche was their use of the Übermensch concept, their rejection of suicide and their affirmation of life. And now, Rosenzweig comes along and portrays Nietzsche as the opposite of Goethe (depicted in a positive light), the negative mirror-image of the Nietzschean figure that philosophizes in the first part of The Star of Redemption. Nietzsche and his hero Zarathustra are now described in a state of perdition, sinfulness, and delusion: A votive tablet is erected on the precipice. It illustrates, through the example of Zoroaster’s decline and fall, how one can become a sinner and a fanatic in one person, an immoralist who smashes all the old tablets, and a tyrant who overpowers his neighbour as well as himself for the sake of the next-but-one, his friend for the sake of new friends. The tablet furthermore warns every traveller who has ascended the ridge not to try to retrace Goethe’s steps on Goethe’s path, like him alone hopefully trusting the tread of his own feet, without the wings of faith or love, a pure son of this earth.42 The Nietzschean world has no universalist pretensions, whether sacred, rational, or moral. Perspectivist philosophy thus reached nihilist conclusions: it is not finding out the truth that must be the primary ambition of modern philosophy, but creating the world as a new myth. At the same time there arises a dynamic and creative conception of time. This modern concept, which creates myth, as Jürgen Habermas tells us, is not a reactionary call to return to our mythical roots in the past, but a claim that only the future will permit the rise of myth.43 Underlying this modern mythology was Nietzsche’s genealogical approach and philosophy of exposure, which were intended to remove all moral, utilitarian, and directional camouflage from being – whether this camouflage took the form of a messianic paradise in the secular progress version, or a golden age in the religious version. Nietzsche was committed to a cyclical concept of non-directional history, and Zarathustra is the personification of the myth of the eternal recurrence. The revival of myth paradoxically constituted the conclusion of philosophical inquiry.44 In place of the philosophy of reason Nietzsche sets up the myth of the will to power; in place of the search for objective truth, he extols subjective creativity; in place of universal rationalism, he urges creative aesthetics. The traditional philosophers had hitherto offered interpretations of the world or attempted to justify its existence; in contrast, the new philosophers are trying to create a world ex nihilo in their own image. This mythical creation, which has shaped modern civilization, is a product of the aesthetic imagination seen in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. According to Rosenzweig, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra does not represent the movement of life, but images, icons, forms. It is as if the escape-route from Plato’s

98  Nietzschean religious Jews cave were blocked, and the only way left was to return to the shadows of the cave, an imitation of an imitation, a mere shade of itself, a reflection of a reflection – in a word, nihilism. Zarathustra retains the form or character of a placard.45 Heidegger claimed that nihilism is no longer European or Western but metaphysical; it becomes the fate of the whole world as a normative condition: “The metaphysical character of the type of the ‘worker’ corresponds to the intentions of the type of Zarathustra with regard to the metaphysics of the will-to-power”.46 Nietzsche declared in1880–1881 that the age of barbarism had begun and that the scientists would serve it. The question that Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt would consequently ask was Zarathustra’s question, which appears in the fourth and last part of the book: “Who will have the courage to be lord of the earth?” Nietzsche did not identify the lord of the earth, but in 1881–1882 he prophesied: “The time will come when the struggle over the rule of the earth will be decided, and it will be decided in the name of essential philosophical doctrines”. In 1883, he again asked, “How can one rule the earth?”, and in 1884, he added, “I am writing for a race of men who do not yet exist, for the rulers of the earth”. Although Zarathustra was the prototype that personified the metaphysics which made the “superman” possible, he was not yet the superman but only his spokesman.47 Then Jünger and other thinkers came, and each one fashioned his hero – Rilke’s angel, Trakl’s stranger, Spengler’s barbarian, Sorel’s syndicalist and the Italian and Russian futurist – in accordance with the metaphysical model provided by Zarathustra.48 The image of Zarathustra which portends death rather than life is regarded as the gravest of all sins in Rosenzweig’s theological philosophy. The Star of Redemption begins with a flight from death and ends with an emergence into life, but in between there is a danger of a degenerate paganism, self-worship. Each person distances himself from his neighbor whom he resembles, and in the absence of an authentic, self-assured personality, man is motivated by a relationship with his neighbor based on ressentiment, a sense of grudging animosity. Each “other” becomes the “other” of another. One becomes obsessed with a search for identity and self-determination, which sees others only in the context of their otherness (différence, in the terminology of Jean-François Lyotard). In a society of “others”, universality is obliterated, and the human element, common to all individuals or others, disappears. This dynamic of alienation is liable to develop into a mutual threat, a severance of social relationships, a break in historical continuity, social revisionism, and a view of humanity like that of Carl Schmitt – them or us, enemy or friend.49 It should be pointed out that Schmitt’s Political Theology was published a year before The Star of Redemption. Schmitt regarded Nietzsche as a “high priest” and envisaged Zarathustra as the jurist of the Third Reich. The belligerent armor-plated image of Zarathustra that made the reality of the friend-enemy conflict a desirable model was seen by him as a landmark of political theology.

Eternal time Rosenzweig saw two aspects in the paganism of Zarathustra: the inner, “sinning” aspect reflecting the emptiness of eternal recurrence and the outer, “fanatical”

Zarathustra faces Mount Sinai  99 aspect reflecting the inhumanity of the Übermensch. In Zarathustra, two different concepts of time were represented. One was the cyclical concept expressed in eternal recurrence: “ ‘Everything straight lies’ [. . .] ‘time itself is a circle’ ” (Z III of the Vision and the Riddle 2). The other concept was the linear one expressed in the Heraclitean flow: “O my brothers, is everything not now in flux?” (Z III of Old and New Law-Tables  8). The Heraclitean river described by Nietzsche represented perpetual becoming, while eternal recurrence was the movement of the motionless form of eternity which Plato in his Timaeus called “the moving shadow of eternity”. These two different notions of time indicate, on the one hand, a cyclic-deterministic concept as in Ecclesiastes (“the thing that hath been, is that which shall be”), and on the other, a flowing, romantic concept as in “Sturm und Drang”. The difference, however, is only apparent. An examination of Nietzsche’s image of the river shows that the concept of time implied in it is not Heraclitean but cyclical, because, even in relation to the river, Nietzsche speaks in terms of a cycle: “Behold a river that flows back to its source through many meanderings!” (Z III of the Virtue that Makes Small). We have thus two apparently contradictory images of a river, the first of which is linear and the second cyclical. On further examination, however, we see that the first river image, that of the “terrifying wind”, is not Heraclitean. Its main purpose is to disrupt the frozen, wintery quality of the universe, to destroy its structurality, to “make it dance” Dionysically, but not to represent a linear movement, totally rejected by Nietzsche (hence, also, his rejection of “progress”, which is a linear concept of time). Nietzsche’s concept was the Stoical-Ecclesiastes one of “The wind [.  .  .] whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to its circuits”, and it was not a concept of becoming but a cyclical concept as described by Plato in his Timaeus. We can distinguish between two concepts of eternity: one concept, called by A. H. Wolfson “Platonic”, and the other which he called “Aristotelian”.50 The “Aristotelian” concept of eternity was time which continued to infinity. The “Platonic” concept rejected any kind of temporal relationships: eternity is the antithesis of time in the sense that the things that are eternal do not continue to infinity but are outside the process of time, like God and the laws of geometry. Plato’s world of ideas is eternal in the sense that it is outside any temporal process: it is in a different category. But in Plato’s created world, there are also temporal relationships, and the complete movement in the created world closest to the extra-temporal eternity was the cyclical movement, as described in the creation of the world in the Timaeus. Meister Eckhardt hoped to be “buried in God” and aspired to a total loss of personality in something transcendental, the obliteration of all consciousness within the divine “nothingness”.51 Nietzsche’s nihilization is of another kind: it does not have the static quality of Eckhardt’s mysticism. It is, one could say, “dynamic”, a kind of hovering in which there is not a complete loss of the self, but its entry into the familiar Nietzschean Rausch condition. This dynamism is naturally emphasized by the dance-images. Thus, Eckhardt is “static” because he is swallowed up in an entity which is outside time. One could call it a transcendental mysticism. Eckhardt’s God lies outside the process of time; he is eternal in the Platonic

100  Nietzschean religious Jews sense. Nietzsche is characterized by what one might call an immanent mysticism: Nietzsche rejects all that is transcendental, and his mysticism is confined to the world, and he therefore cannot reject movement, but chooses the movement closest to the frontiers of reality, and that is cyclical movement, which is the earthly approximation to the divine eternity as interpreted by Plato. “God is dead”, declared Nietzsche, and he remained within the boundaries of the immanent. In Platonic terms, Nietzsche climbed as high as he could in the immanent universe, reaching the highest possible point and then lost himself in the cyclical immanent eternal movement. He did not make the “leap” from the immanent to the transcendent, as Albert Camus suggested with other existentialists.52 Nietzsche did not obliterate himself in an extra-temporal eternity because he, like Camus, denied the transcendental. For Rosenzweig, eternity lay outside the boundaries of historical, human time: Eternity is not a very long time; it is a Tomorrow that could as well be Today. Eternity is a future which, without ceasing to be future, is nonetheless present [. . .]. More exactly, the growth has no relationship at all to time.53 Rosenzweig places the Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch (superman) within the historicity of becoming, in contrast to the “superworld” revealed only through revelation: “While man was created to be a superman, the world only becomes superworld in the revelation of God to man”.54 But one should remember that God’s eternity is meta-historical: “God himself, however, plants the sapling of his own eternity neither into the beginning of time nor into its middle, but utterly beyond time into eternity”. Eternity is hidden in the present, and the present anticipates eternity. The eternal phenomenon of the kingdom of heaven will come as a redemption, as something beyond time. The meeting of the kingdom of heaven and redemption shows that the love there is not an intention but is present in man and the world. Man brings about the kingdom of heaven through his actions, but God authorizes him to do this through revelation. Revelation contradicts the concept of progress. The Nietzschean revolution was that of abandoning the idea of progress in favor of the idea of a process for its own sake. The main thing, the thing which brought satisfaction, was the pursuit of power, but the achievement of one’s goal was hollow and unsatisfying. Satisfaction and dissatisfaction were “ontologized”. Nietzsche wanted to detach modern man from social norms and to adapt him to the rhythm of his private world which he had created. Ethics was no longer a matter between man and his fellow man, but between man and the cosmos. Thus, the will to power could be understood as a search for authenticity: that is, as a desire to find a correlation between man and the rhythm of his world. Traditional philosophy claimed that, if the chain of cause and effect was broken, one reached a transcendental first cause. As against this, Nietzsche remained within the sphere of the immanent, claiming that the will to power was a permanent cause and continuous being, and that it was consequently eternal (WM 690). This was contrary to the cosmological vision of Aristotle, which maintained that,

Zarathustra faces Mount Sinai  101 if the reality of the universe was not determined by a first cause outside the chain of cause and effect, one would find oneself in a situation of infinite regression. It was likewise contrary to Hegel’s concept of progress, according to which the unfolding of time was one of the revelations of the Geist, and that therefore progress was revealed in history. In distinction from these two concepts of regression and progress, Nietzsche identified eternity with the infinite duration of time, or, in other words, with eternal recurrence. Thus, what, one may ask, were Nietzsche’s ideas concerning time and progress? The idea that the duration of time is infinite served, among other things, as the basis for the concept of human progress. If time was infinitely open, then there was a possibility of continual improvement: that is to say, there was no obstacle from the point of view of the framework of time. The idea of progress was based on the assumption of improvement: Kant’s distinction between the nature of the human world and that of the divine world was that, in His transcendental world, God began with good, whereas, in our world, we begin with evil. In the idea of progress, an inferior primordial situation is hinted at as a starting-point, which needs to be transcended. This burden of values was totally rejected by Nietzsche. The idea of progress was for him a variant of the attempt to give an inner significance to process. If the main thing in the revelation of the will to power was the process rather than the purpose, then no importance could be attached to the conclusion of the historical process, but only to its development. Nietzsche said that one had to deny any significance to the process itself and to divest it of any sense of direction, either positive or negative. Plato also denied that being possessed significance or purpose, but he conferred these qualities on the eternal world of ideas. Spinozan pantheism, which identified the world with God, also denied that the world had a purpose, but “logical necessity” bestowed on being a divine significance. Plato and Spinoza took values from being and gave them to something else: Platonic ideas or logical necessity. In contrast to these, Nietzsche proclaimed a total nihilism based on eternal recurrence: “This is the most extreme form of nihilism: the nothing (the ‘meaningless’), eternity” (WM 55). And if Rosenzweig gives a value to the kingdom of heaven, the promise is for the present time which is the potential of a future which has not yet come to pass. In the present, there is already a kernel of the future that has not yet ripened and has not been concretized or become historical. Unlike the idea of progress, which has a considered, cumulative quality, revelation appears suddenly, without any progression.55 The creation of the world was the first revelation, and the second revelation was not given little by little within measurable, chronological time but burst forth as an act of grace and not as part of a progression.56 According to Rosenzweig, Judaism as a monotheistic faith embodies and proclaims a thing of universal significance by its creation of an eternal time parallel with the time of humanity as a whole. Although the trinity of God, world and man is human-universal, the Jewish consciousness creates a liturgy of particular time sanctified by the Jewish calendar, the rituals, and the Jewish festivals. The meaning of eternity, creation, revelation, and redemption is revealed in the cycle of the

102  Nietzschean religious Jews Jewish year. Jewish time is steeped in a significance with which it is loaded within a philosophy-religion that views itself as universal.57 Rosenzweig disagreed with the Reform position that sought to insert Judaism within the time-dimension.58 Instead of the Jew being present in the face of eternity, the Reform Jew stressed his stand within time. Rosenzweig wished to preserve the discrepancy between the essence of Judaism and the historical dimension in which the Jew pursued his path from idol-worship to Judaism. In a similar way, Baruch Kurzweil protested against Reform Judaism and the Science of Judaism (Jüdische Wissenschaft), which wished to change the essentially static nature of Judaism, and also feared the modern phenomenon of secular Zionism which in his opinion replaced the meta-historical Jewish religion with a historical Jewish nationhood.59

Greek myth, Jewish myth Nietzsche and Rosenzweig expressed in their thinking a profound need to redefine myth in the modern era, and it is not surprising if they began their investigations with classical culture. Nietzsche’s early writings, and especially The Birth of Tragedy (1871), were an attempt to interpret pre-Socratic culture in the light of Schopenhauer and Wagner. Nietzsche presented Greek tragedy as an ideal model of art. Tragedy, he claimed, gave aesthetic significance to an illusory order of the universe, while reason and morality, two sides of the same coin, tried to present themselves as the real order. Tragedy maintained the correct equilibrium in the vision of the world: the equilibrium between Dionysius and Apollo (BT4). These two forces expressed in aesthetics are the great creative forces of the collectivity. The relationship between them is like that between form and matter. Apollo symbolized proportion, restraint, and self-knowledge, while Dionysus symbolized excess, impulsiveness, and creative vitality. Greek culture, according to Nietzsche, existed as long as the Apollonian-Dionysian equilibrium was maintained, and Nietzsche depicted Greek history as the dialectical interaction of the Apollonian taming principle and the Dionysian-creative principle. The Apollonian characteristic of restraining the blind vital forces found in Dionysius constituted the founding principle of Nietzschean aesthetics: tragedy as the culmination of art and as an aesthetic illusion was a metaphysical consolation for a world that was devoid of purpose, reason, or moral significance. According to Nietzsche, Greek art at its height was represented by three giants – Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Homer  – who created the language of myth. Their creations – Oedipus, Prometheus, and Odysseus – expressed in the language of myth the immanent problematics of man: suffering, rebellion, loneliness (BT9). Aesthetics, as the language of myth, mediated between man and the universe, and provided an overview: through the instrumentality of the myth, the whole of the present was perceived from the point of view of eternity – that is to say, as something beyond time.60 By means of myth, the historical becomes suprahistorical, and thus Greek tragedy becomes a supra-historical model of art. The language of myth, aesthetics, becomes a new metaphysics, and in this, Nietzsche

Zarathustra faces Mount Sinai  103 is revealed as a modern metaphysician: his aesthetics was confined to this world and did not need anything beyond it, and aesthetics was given the task of providing redemption and catharsis, and indeed, that was Rosenzweig’s main protest against Nietzsche’s writing. The Greek myths, in Nietzsche’s opinion, maintained the correct equilibrium between the historical and the supra-historical, and between the relativity of transient existence and its metaphysical, eternal significance. The participation of man in the lives of the gods by means of myth saved him from his boredom and bestowed a metaphysical significance on his daily life. Myth exposed the finiteness of existence, but it did so through utilization of the illusive means of legends, gods, and heroes, which gave life its metaphysical dimension: the Greek, as in Homer, created his Olympian gods as a response to the horror of existence (BT3). The creation of the gods and the Olympian culture served as a criterion for the continuation of life, and for a will to persist in living despite the metaphysical pain it involved. The gods gave justification to human life in that they themselves passed through the human experience. Nietzsche’s immanent metaphysics was based on Schopenhauer, who taught that man was redeemed from passion by the aesthetic experience, and on Wagner who resurrected myth. Nietzsche’s innovation, which already stood out at this early stage of his writing before he developed his positive philosophy, was the passage from the transcendent to the immanent by means of an aesthetic myth, which gave affirmation to life rather than provided redemption from it. Existentialism, likewise, following Nietzsche, stressed man’s need to make a new choice: a choice that was only possible in a moment of despair. Despair – especially in Kierkegaard and Sartre  – was regarded as something positive because it forced man into reflection and self-criticism, and to make a choice that was a new and authentic act. This did not normally happen in the course of daily life, but only in situations of existential crisis. It was precisely in situations of despair that man gained the strength to look at the disharmonious universe and to affirm life. In the situation of the First World War, Rosenzweig joined section to section, aphorism to aphorism, creating The Star of Redemption in which the myth of revelation was revealed anew. Like Schelling and Nietzsche, Rosenzweig regarded myth as “narrated philosophy” and, indeed, The Star of Redemption reveals an interrelationship between myth and philosophy. The creation narrative, miracles, redemption: all of these are myths linked to monotheistic revelation, projections of the myth of revelation. According to Rosenzweig, the truth of myth and prophetic vision is a linguistic form of consciousness.61 Myth interprets human beings through the Word of God. The religious discourse between God and man takes place in this ancient linguistic form. Through divine inspiration, human discourse can rise to the elevated plane of myth and create a true relationship between men and God. Rosenzweig distinguishes between the monotheistic myth of the Bible and pagan myth, which was an early pre-revelatory stage in the religious evolution of man, who was bound to nature. Biblical myth liberated man from fate and nature, and through revelation revealed to him the One God. Pagan myth is also a kind of language, a form of

104  Nietzschean religious Jews naïve consciousness, one in which God has not yet been revealed, and it is always parallel to the truth of revelation.62 Those who prayed to Zeus and Apollo, the gods of Olympus, were real people and not tragic heroes.63 They lived in a historical reality and their understanding was a true one. For them, said Rosenzweig, the pagan deities were major symbols in Western culture, and they were a necessary stage in the human development towards revelation. The biblical myth of revelation was a mighty step forward; both Buber and Rosenzweig saw this myth as representing the encounter between the human “I” and the divine “Thou”, an encounter that was a real event, a living occurrence. The biblical text describing the divine-human discourse is an outstanding mythical text – a text of monotheistic myth. At the end of The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig returned to Nietzsche and confronted the greatest of his paradoxes: God is not life: God is light. He is the lord of life, but he is no more living than dead [. . .] To say the one or the other of him, with the old [philosopher] that “God has life”, or with the new one that ‘God is dead’ reveals the identical pagan bias.64 God should not be seen in human terms of “life” or “death”, for “God neither lives nor is he dead; rather he quickens the dead – he loves [. . .] The revelation of divine love is the heart of the All”.65 This, in fact, is the bottom line of The Star of Redemption in regard to Nietzsche: he denies God, love, and the Other. Selflove is seen as pagan and consequently dangerous. In the transition from Hegelian idealism to Nietzschean paganism, love loses its reality by being displaced. It becomes an empty love without a dwelling-place, a love that is directed to the ego and not to the other, to the individual and not to the community. If Rosenzweig admired Nietzsche at the beginning of The Star of Redemption on account of his way of philosophizing and his dislike of pretentious philosophical systems in general and Hegelian idealism in particular, when he summed up the positive teachings of the philosopher of Zarathustra, it seems that he felt that he had gone to the opposite extreme, from rationalism to paganism. Many thinkers after the First World War were influenced by the symbolic interpretations of the Spenglerian school of thought. The meaning of this morphological approach to history is that its forms represent symbols and metaphors, which govern the socioeconomic reality.66 These thinkers regarded world history as an aesthetic and symbolic phenomenon, a series of actions directed by a dominant form. These world-creating forms were not human agents determining the course of history but merely forces “directing the drama of history”, resulting in a dehumanization of history. Major German intellectuals such as Dilthey, Simmel, Scheller, Weber, and Spengler sought a new perspective on the world and a new approach to history, opposing the scientific objectivism, historicism, and Marxist materialism, which then prevailed. Spengler, in his book The Decline of the West (1919, 1922), attempted to define a morphology of history, a system of symbols in which forms operated through myths to order the cultural-economic reality. According to Spengler,

Zarathustra faces Mount Sinai  105 man does not create history; rather, it is forms (Gestalten) that mold man. Spengler’s influence led several circles in Germany, including Ernst Jünger’s, to regard history as a symbolic and aesthetic phenomenon, a series of actions ruled by a dominating form. Georg Lukács criticized this view in his controversial work The Destruction of Reason, arguing that these world-creating forms or myths were not human agents determining the course of history, but merely actors “directing the drama of history”.32 Common to all these thinkers was the idea that the historical process has a number of types or forms. The more mystical history becomes, the more it consecrates one particular “form” and negates the other “forms”. The form of Zarathustra sought to dominate other forms; the perspective of Zarathustra as the will to power sought to dominate other perspectives. If “God is dead”, then all perspectives have an equal validity. In the absence of a transcendental point of reference, man is merely the will to power. In the Nietzschean perspectivism, the image of God (the form of Zarathustra) overshadows God himself, the likeness overshadows its creator, paganism eclipses monotheism and sovereign man, the Sovereign of the World. The act of revelation in The Star of Redemption is revealed in a fragmentary, broken, sometimes self-contradictory manner (it seems that Rosenzweig was saying that the very existence of a system of thought is philosophical hubris). Rosenzweig appears as someone who climbs up Nietzsche’s ladder to see from one place what cannot be seen from another, to ask critical questions and philosophize, not with a hammer but with phylacteries. When one cannot climb any further, the ladder is liable to become a wall, the method an obstacle and the means an end. Rosenzweig climbed for a moment up the ladder and then peeped behind the curtain to be present at revelation like a stowaway on a ship discovering unknown continents or like someone present at the giving of the Law at Sinai. For Rosenzweig, the philosophical alternative provided by Nietzsche in the figure of Zarathustra was the reflection of the outlook opposite his own. In Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, he saw the image of a nihilistic universe, a mirage of power, a form without content. Zarathustra represented the emptiness of the concept of cyclical time and the inhumanity of the Übermensch. The negative figure  of the pagan Zarathustra, decadent and self-absorbed, helped to define Rosenzweig’s monotheistic Jewish outlook. Similarly, the young Buber was initially enthusiastic about Nietzsche but soon turned his back on him. Is it possible to trace a connection between the position of Rosenzweig, Buber’s friend and partner in the translation of the Bible, who wrote that “the first real human being among the philosophers was also the first who beheld God face to face – even if it was only in order to deny him” and the development of Buber’s relationship to Nietzsche from his early enthusiasm to his later repulsion?

Notes 1 Benjamin Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy, Cambridge 2009, 145. 2 Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat, Munich 1920.

106  Nietzschean religious Jews 3 Gershom Scholem, “Rosenzweig and His Book The Star of Redemption”, in Paul Mendes-Flohr, ed., The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, Hanover and London 1988, 25; Myriam Bienenstock, “Rosenzweig’s Hegel”, Owl of Minerva 23, 2 (Spring 1992): 177–182. 4 Rosenzweig to Hans Ehrenberg, 26 September  2010, in Franz Rosenzweig, Briefe, unter Mitwirkung von Ernst Simon, Ausgewählt und Herausgegeben von Edith Rosenzweig, Berlin 1935, 53–56. On Rosenzweig, Hegel and Historicism, see Otto Poggeler, “Between Enlightenment and Romanticism: Rosenzweig and Hegel”, in MendesFlohr, ed., The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, Brandies 1988, 107–123; MendesFlohr, “Franz Rosenzweig and the Crisis of Historicism”, ibid., 124–137; Alexander Altman, “Franz Rosenzweig on History”, ibid., 124–137. 5 Ephraim Meir, “The Unpublished Correspondence Between Franz Rosenzweig and Gritli Rosenstock-Huessy on the ‘Star of Redemption’ ”, Jewish Studies Quarterly 9, 1 (2002): 21–70. 6 Rosenzweig to Gertrud Oppenheim, Rosenzweig, Briefe, 342. 7 Moshe Schwarz, “Introduction”, Kochav Ha-Ge’ula, 18–21. [Hebrew]. On Schelling and Rosenzweig, see Moshe Schwarz, From Myth to Revelation, Tel Aviv 1978. [Hebrew]. 8 Ernest Rubinstein, An Episode of Jewish Romanticism: Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, Albany 1999, 20. 9 Ephraim Meir, Discourse with Living Philosophers, trans. and ed. Miriam Meir, Jerusalem 2004 [Hebrew]. On other affinities of Rosenzweig to philosophers, see the booklet devoted to Rosenzweig, Daat: A Journal of Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah (Winter 1981). [Hebrew]. 10 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 8. 11 Ibid. 12 Amos Funkenstein, “An Escape from History: Rosenzweig on the Destiny of Judaism”, History and Memory 2, 2 (1990): 117–135. 13 Ibid., 7, and see especially, Hagai Dagan, “Philosophizing in the Face of Death  – Schopenhauer and Rosenzweig”, Jewish Studies Quarterly 8, 1 (2001): 66–79. 14 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 18. 15 Nietzsche’s views on morality may be found in most of his works. Here I will mention three: Daybreak, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Genealogy of Morals. 16 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 18–19. On Nietzsche’s influence on Rosenzweig, and the latter’s affinity to Nietzsche, see Cordula Hufnagel, “Nietzsche im ‘Stern der Erlösung’ ”, in Von Martin Brasser, ed., Rosenzweig als Leser, Kontextuelle Kommentare zum ‘Stern und Erlösung’, Tübingen 2004, 291–303; Richard Cohen, “Rosenzweig versus Nietzsche”, Nietzsche Studien 19 (1990): 346–366. 17 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 18; Karl Löwith, “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig – A Postscript to Being and Time”, in A Levinson, ed., Nature, History and Existentialism, Evanston 1966, 51–78; Eli Peter Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy, Berkeley 2003. 18 Ohana, The Dawn of Political Nihilism, 44–47. 19 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 9. Nietzsche does generally not appear in the academic literature about Rosenzweig, and in two important studies, his name is not even mentioned  – i.e., Pierre Bouretz, “From the Night of the World to the Blaze of Redemption: The Star of Franz Rosenzweig”, Witnesses for the Future, 84–165; Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, trans. C. Tihanyi, Detroit 1992. 20 Alfred Weber, History of Philosophy, trans. F. Thilly, New York 1901. 21 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols., trans. C.F. Atkinson, New York 1947. 22 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, London 1945.

Zarathustra faces Mount Sinai  107 23 Ohana, The Dawn of Political Nihilism, 31–36. 24 Rosenzsweig, “Diary”, in Rivka Horowitz, ed., Selected Correspondence and Diary Entries (Mivhar  Iggerot ve- Kitei Yoman), 29 February1908, Jerusalem 1987, 24. [Hebrew]. 25 White Hayden, “Nietzsche  – The Poetic Defence of History in the Metaphorical Mode”, Metahistory of the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, Baltimore 1973, 332. 26 Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte, Cambridge 1987. 27 Ohana, The Dawn of Political Nihilism, 26–29. 28 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 12; Emmanuel Levinas, “Foreword”, to Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation, 13–22; idem., “Franz Rosenzweig”, trans. Richard A. Cohen, Midstream (November 1983): 33–40. 29 Ibid., 104. 30 Ibid., 105. 31 Ibid., 8. See especially, Elliot R. Wolfson, “Facing the Effaced: Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig”, Journal for the History of Modern Theology 4 (1997): 39–81. 32 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 105. 33 Ibid. 34 Ohana, “The Role of Myth in History: Nietzsche and Sorel”, in Religion, Ideology and Nationalism in Europe and America, Jerusalem 1986, 119–140. 35 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 106. 36 Ibid. 37 Fiorato Pierfrancesco and Hartwig Wiedebach, “Hermann Cohen im Stern der Erlösung”, in M. Brasser, ed., Rosenzweig als Leser: Kontextuelle Kommentare zum ‘Stern der Erlösung’, Tübingen 2004, 305–355; Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of Sources of Judaism, New York 1972; Martin D. Jaffe, “Liturgy and ­Ethics – ­Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig on the Day of Atonement”, Journal of Religious Ethics 7, 2 (1979), 215–228; Rivka Horowitz, “Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig”, in Aviezer Cohen, ed., Franz Rosenzweig – The Star and the Man – ­Collected Studies, Beersheva 2010, 231–250. 38 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 386; Ephraim Meir, Star of Jacob – Life and Works of Franz Rosenzweig, Jerusalem 1994. [Hebrew]. 39 Yehoyada Amir, Believing Knowledge: Studies in the Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, Jerusalem 2004, 260. 40 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 380. 41 Ibid., 286. 42 Ibid., 286–287; Paul Ricoeur, “The ‘Figure’ in Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption”, in trans. David Pellauer, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination, Minneapolis 1995, 93–107. 43 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA 1987. 44 Ohana, Homo Mythicus, 3–10; Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth”, in T. Sebeok, ed., Myth – A Symposium, Bloomington 1958, 50–66. 45 Richard Cohen, “Rosenzweig versus Nietzsche”, 364; Leora Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered, Princeton 2009; Yehoida Amir, “From Pagan Myth to Biblical Myth – The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig”, Daat 31 (Summer 1993): 47–64. [Hebrew]; Zeev Levy, “On Myth in the Outlook of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig”, Tura 1, Tel Aviv 1989, 306–319. [Hebrew]; Yehoshua Amir, “Der Platz der Geschichte bei Franz Rosenzweig”, Trumah, B,1 (1987): 199–211; Moshe Schwartz, Language, Myth, Art: Studies in the Jewish Thought of the Modern Period, Tel Aviv 1966, 155–194. [Hebrew].

108  Nietzschean religious Jews 46 Martin Heidegger, Zur Seinsfrage, Frankfurt 1956, 17. 47 J.M. Palmer, Les Écrits politiques de Heidegger, Paris 1968, 232–247. 48 Ohana, “The ‘Anti-Intellectual’ Intellectuals as Political Mythmakers”, Homo Mythicus, 2009, 141–150. 49 Ibid., 273–304. 50 H.A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, New York 1958, 358. 51 J. Bernhardt, “Meister Eckhardt und Nietzsche”, in V.H. Fischer, ed., Blätter fur Deutsche Philosophie: Zeitschrift der Deutschen Philosophischen Gesellschaft, 3, Bd. 4, Berlin 1930, 404–425. 52 Ohana, The Bound, Sacrificed and Crucified: Albert Camus and the Limits of Violence, Jerusalem 2013. [Hebrew]. 53 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 224. 54 Ibid., 260. 55 Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas, Chicago 1994. 56 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 221–225. 57 Ibid., 308–324. 58 Amir, Believing Knowledge, 298. 59 See chapter five on Baruch Kurzweil. 60 B. Bennett, “Nietzsche’s Idea of Myth  – The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics”, PMLA, 9 (1979): 420–433. 61 Eliezer Schweid, “Myth and Historical Memory in Jewish Thought in Modern Times”, in Ohana and Wistrich, eds., Myth and Memory, London 1995, 59–62. [Hebrew]; Ron Margolin, “Jewish Myth in the Twentieth Century”, 240–256. 62 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 35. 63 Rosenzweig, Naharaim, trans. Yehoshua Amir, Jerusalem 1960, 226. [Hebrew]. 64 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 380. 65 Ibid. 66 Ohana, Homo Mythicus, 146–147.

Part III

The resurrection of myth

5 “It came over me like a revelation”

The Nietzschean Buber What was the source of the obsessive interest that Buber showed in his early admiration for and later opposition to the German philosopher? Why did he keep going back to his works although already in his youth he had turned his back on him? Why did he value Nietzsche? Was it because of his personality, his thought, his paradoxicality? What reason is there for a contemporary reader to compare the thought of the Zionist humanist with that of the “philosopher with a hammer” who proclaimed (and, some say, brought on), the age of nihilism? The answer to these questions requires a genealogical survey of the development of Buber’s philosophical thought and an examination of Nietzsche’s influence on it.1 In 1898–1900, Martin Buber wrote his first article, “Zarathustra”, devoted to Nietzsche, and in 1901, he was appointed editor of Die Welt, the organ of the World Zionist Organization. The proximity of the two dates was not coincidental in Buber’s political and intellectual development: it is not surprising if he discovered Nietzsche and Zionism at the same time. He saw the German philosopher and the Jewish national movement as embodying modern, secular, and vital forces that rebelled against a normalization of private and public life, which finally leads to decadence and necessitated different conditions of existence for the individual and the people. In the year in which he published his article, his poem “Das Gebet” appeared in the pages of the newspaper he was to edit, and it is impossible not to see that the subject of the poem, the Jewish people, is viewed in a Nietzschean perspective: Lord, Lord, shake my people, Strike it, bless it, furiously, gently, Make it burn, make it free, Heal your child [. . .]2 The poem emphasized the spiritual rebirth (Auferstehung) that Buber wished to bring about in the Jewish people, an aim that was in opposition to the political direction Herzl gave the Zionist movement. In December 1901, Buber, together with Ephraim Moses Lilien, organized an exhibition of Jewish painting that took

112  The resurrection of myth place during the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basle. In his article “On Jewish Art”, published after the exhibition, he wrote, Zionism and art are two forms of our rebirth [. . .]. [Jewish art] signifies for us first of all a great educator. An educator for a vital perception (Anschauen) of nature and human beings – a vital feeling (Empfinden) of all that is strong and beautiful. This perception and feeling, which we have lacked for so long, will be restored to us by our artists. And it is of utmost importance for us that our people regain this vital perception and feeling. For only full human beings can be full Jews, who are capable of and worthy of achieving for themselves a homeland.3 The aestheticization of politics was not an empty formula for Buber. The aesthetic revolution that Nietzsche sought to bring about in Western culture did not leave the young Jewish thinker indifferent. The audacity of the philosopher of the will to power was in his opinion shown first and foremost in his call for a self-creating human being. This also applied to Judaism. The Zionist revolution presented a historic opportunity to modernize the Jewish people which were sick from living “outside itself” in exile. But Buber’s enthusiasm for both the philosopher (Nietzsche) and the leader (Herzl) quickly waned. As Akiva Ernst Simon astutely observed, “Neither vitality for vitality’s sake in the case of the philosopher nor nationhood for nationhood’s sake in the case of the leader held him for very long”.4 Buber turned to Ahad Ha-Am, whom he saw as a teacher and not as a leader, and under the inspiration of spiritual Zionism founded the cultural section of the Zionist Association in Berlin and then set up the Jewish publishing house “Jüdischer Verlag” with his friend Berthold Feiwel. In Autobiographical Fragments, which described the sources of his intellectual development and the books, which influenced him early in his life, Buber mentioned only two thinkers: Kant and Nietzsche. He added that he was mesmerized by Thus Spoke Zarathustra when he read it at the age of 17. About two years after that [his liberation from the category of time by Kant] the other book took possession of me [emphasis added], a book that was, to be sure, the work of a philosopher but was not a philosophical book: Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I say “took possession of me”, for here a teaching did not simply and calmly confront me, but a willed and able – splendidly willed and splendidly able – utterance stormed up to and over me. This book, characterized by its author as the greatest present that had ever been made to mankind up till then, worked on me not in the manner of a gift but in the manner of an invasion which deprived me of my freedom, and it was a long time until I could liberate myself from it.5 The works of Kant and Nietzsche – “catastrophic events” as he called them – left their imprint on the development of his thinking. Until he read them, he had difficulty in understanding the concept of time and its significance both as an axis with

“It came over me like a revelation”  113 a beginning and end, and as an axis without a beginning and end. Kant explained that space and time are formal conditions of our understanding, and this gave him a valuable lesson in philosophical freedom. And Nietzsche, for his part, gave him a particular understanding of time: “The eternal recurrence of the same”, a cyclical concept in which there is the possibility of experiencing all possibilities, in which different states of existence keep returning.6 Nietzsche, thought the young Buber, wished the “basic perception” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra to be understood as an interpretation of time in which all things would finally appear to be as they were at the beginning. He saw this perception of time as the greatest innovation of Zarathustra. The Dionysian pathos that characterized The Birth of Tragedy became a philosophical ethos in Zarathustra. He was a modern Dionysius who with enthusiasm of a “new man” soared above heights and depths. Although the nihilistic implications of “eternal recurrence” were unacceptable to the young Buber, he also found consolation in this cyclical vision: the greatness that the Jewish people knew in the past could reappear in a different form in the future. “What has been will be” is not only a passive and skeptical idea but represents a new, or rather, renewed horizon. Life does not simply grow faint and fade away but springs forth as an inexhaustible source of eternal forms and recurrent phenomena. The young Buber was drawn to the radical challenge posed by Nietzsche: if a hidden order, a structure of some significance, lay behind the ethics and rationalism of traditional philosophy, behind Nietzsche’s aesthetics there was only the naked reality of chaos. Nietzsche was the first thinker to destroy any possible connection between aesthetics on the one hand, and reason, morals, or truth on the other. In Nietzsche’s technique of exposure one may perceive an attempt to lay bare the essential condition of the world, to unmask phenomena and values which had taken root in the course of history. There had been a philosophical camouflage and an historical deception, and one had to expose the ultimate foundations and reach the bedrock of chaotic existence itself. Hence Nietzsche’s philosophical deciphering of the myths of Western culture as a starting-point for the reorientation of philosophy. Nietzsche was a radical thinker who attempted to “clean up” Western culture and find the “naturalness of human nature”.7 He presented traditional philosophy with a modern challenge in the same way as Vico did for history, Marx for political economy, and Freud for psychology: for him, the “radix” of Western culture was human action, rooted in the whole of existence. Buber was enthusiastic about the possibility of cosmic radicality embodied in Zarathustra and Dionysius who had the fervor of a new man striding beyond peaks and valleys. Even before writing the article “Zarathustra”, Buber wrote a preface to the article, a preface that has remained unpublished. In this undated preface, written in antique German script, he wrote, “This above all: if you ever come across a book on Friedrich Nietzsche with my name on the cover, please know that this is the introduction [Einlei-tung] as well as the manual [Anleitung] to its comprehension”.8 The poem that appears on the cover, a sort of dedication: To you, the daring seekers, experimenters, and all those who ever sailed onto the terrible seas,

114  The resurrection of myth To you, drunk on riddles, bedazzled by twilight, whose soul has been attracted to every deceptive abyss by the sound of flutes For you do not wish to follow a lead by a coward and, you hate to decipher where you can guess the answer – To you alone I will tell the riddle which I beheld, – the face of the most lonesome one.9 What fascinated the young Buber was the audacious appearance of Nietzsche on the philosophical stage as a discoverer of new continents, a venturer into the unknown, a spiritual adventurer who endangered himself in his spiritual journeys. The literary style of the preface inserted itself into the article: It is my peculiarity to speak of each human being in his language, and when I sing of a person’s harmony, I shall do it in his own rhythm. Forgive me, therefore, for the nonmethod [Unart] of these Zarathustra-sounds, oh my friends!10 Buber, with the chutzpah of the young, was proud of his aphoristic, unregulated style, depending on sound and rhythm, like that of the celebrated philosopher, rather than on content. In scattered observations in “Zarathustra”, Buber compared himself to a patient who, as in the Nietzschean model, could only find the cure for his illness if he contracted a new one. He admitted that he would not get to the bottom of his illness until he became famous. Although he felt the intensity of the identity crisis he experienced, this was not the illness he suffered from. He had recovered only recently, as a result of insights gained from Nietzsche. The analysis he made of his illness revealed that, in his youth, Buber was drawn to the system and thought of the philosopher and not to his personality. He did not see the living thinker beyond the philosophical veil. He summed up his relationship to Nietzsche in those days as follows: “That was my illness. I did not believe in you, I believed you”. What rescued him this time was Zarathustra: It came over me, like a revelation [. . .]. It is only a beginning [. . .] and truly also – think about it – a birth of tragedy from the musical spirit, but soon, so it seems to me, I will lose the thread of the maze. For it came over me like a gigantic chaos illuminated by flashes of uncreated light, a Dionysian dithyramblike laughter, a childlike euphoria, a sublime joy, a first “yes”. An intimation of dancing overcame me which pulled me upward into the deep black abysses.11 Buber had an ecstatic experience which, according to him, transferred him from the world of philosophical systems to a state of poetic freedom. It was a liberation from the stranglehold of theory that stifles free self-expression. The experience of the illness and the healing of it was so overwhelming that Buber was unable

“It came over me like a revelation”  115 to bear it alone. He felt the need to bring in future friends: “Who, but you, wants to listen to the story of an illness with its convalescence and redemption, listen to it as your own inner joyful experience. Who besides you wants to – laugh blood – with me”. Unlike the ecstasy of the mystic, an experience which is self-contained and has no need of anyone else, Buber admitted that the emotional storm that enveloped him was more than he could take, and calls to (his) comrades of Zarathustra: No excuses! No forgiveness! You happy, free soul. Lend to this unreasonable book Ear, heart, and shelter! Believe me, friends, my unreason, Did not lead to my undoing.12 “Zarathustra” provides us with a glimpse of the feverish mind of the Jewish youth making his way within the Jewish tradition. He tried not to lose himself among the waves of European philosophy sweeping over him and the currents of contemporary thought threatening to drown him. He struggled with his teacher: they gave and received blows. On the one hand, he acknowledged, “I love you Friedrich Nietzsche, for your free speech [. . .] your performance as a teacher-builder [. . .] I love the artist in you, the psychologist and moralist”. On the other hand, he wrote, “Man has to leave Nietzsche in order to learn to like him”. Buber admitted in “Zarathustra” that at an early stage of his studies he discovered the illusions of German culture that were prevalent at that time and the decadence of the period: I was never an ultra-positivist. There was always a certain amount of romanticism in me, a kind of artistic will to create my own God, Zeus Cronius, ideal, Ubermensch; self, Prometheus unbound [in English]; Peer Gynt, culture of beauty. And innumerable other elements: a deep, fanatical passion for the Greek ideal, an oceanic, limitless self-consciousness/self-unconsciousness, filled with sunshine and titanic paroxisms of madness; a raging hatred pregnant with disgust of the entire atmosphere in which I lived; a grim dislike of official morality; official Bildung, the conventional senile smiling, whimpering, and wordplays; tigerlike desires reaching to heaven, disdain, sickening disdain of all catholicism and asceticism, in short, a young, unbounding Dionysian power which wanted to sing, to fly, to laugh, to destroy, to build – to build castles in the air.13 There was a great similarity between Nietzsche and the young Buber. Both wanted to cast off the chains of civilization in order to pursue their special path; both were obsessive about their philosophical illness and overcame it; both wanted to revolutionize the basic norms and were entranced by the culture of beauty; both expended great energy in seeking to mold themselves.

116  The resurrection of myth In December 1900, four months after Nietzsche’s death, Buber published his eulogy, “A Word on Nietzsche and Life Values” in the women’s magazine Die Kunst im Leben (Art in Life). In the eulogy, Buber described the personality of the philosopher, a man after his own heart. Unlike Schopenhauer, who was depicted in the article as lukewarm, Nietzsche, according to Buber, was a Messiah-like hero in an age of mediocrity. The deceased philosopher was compared to Siegfried proclaiming resurrection who fought with the finest and noblest sword of the century against the prevailing metaphysics and morality, or he saw in them tools and symptoms of decaying. He uncovered the feeble lies of our values and our truths. But the tip of his raised sword glistened purple in the light of the rising sun. He found fresh, powerful seed corns in ancient royal crypts; from dead cultures he wrested elements for new formation. In the confused and barren turmoil of the present, he collected the authentic and the productive. He erected in front of our eyes the statue of the heroic human being who creates his own self and beyond his self. In place of a thin and lame altruism he put the egotism of his own development and the virtue of giving; in place of pity he put cooperation and shared joy [Mitfreude]. To those who worshiped the beyond, he taught the noble meaning of the earth and of the human body. He contrasted the ideal of a comfortable and painless life with a stormy and dangerous life, whose powerful beauty is enhanced by the pain. Instead of happiness for the greatest number, he considered the creation of great people and great ideas to be the purpose of humanity.14 This succinct formulation sums up the effect that Nietzsche had on Buber’s generation. They were open to the transvaluation of their values, to the promotion of the “ego” in place of the altruism of the “slave morality”, which had become the accepted norm, to the example which Nietzsche provided of a heroic figure creating himself. The healing Nietzschean message for the sickness of the age was so urgently needed that Buber sought to obtain it at any price. His adulation of Nietzsche and his vision caused him to transfer the concepts of resurrection, will and power to the Jewish revolution. The Jewish revival as conceived by the young Buber was a mixture of cultural renewal and dithyrambic meter, Messianic gospel, and self-creation, the transvaluation of Jewish values and the will to power. Nietzsche, for Buber, was a unique thinker who transcended conceptualization: At all times there have been human beings who did not belong in a particular category and who cannot be labeled, for every classification does them violence: Every classification defies expressing the essential in them. Too many different spheres cross in them, for too many different intimations and dawns are they the mouthpiece and the aurora, and they cannot be forced into a particular conceptual box with others. They are great and defy definition as life itself does, whose apostle they are.15

“It came over me like a revelation”  117 Is he a philosopher? He did not create a unified edifice of thought. Is he an artist? He did not create any objects. Is he a psychologist? His deepest knowledge deals with the future of the soul. Is he a poet? Only if we think of poets as they once existed [emphasis added]: “Visionaries who tell us what might be”, who give us “a foretaste of future virtues”. Is he the founder of a new Gemeinschaft? Many rise up in his name, but they do not unite, for each one finds a different guiding light in this blessing night sky, his own, and only that, and each owes him not thanks for general knowledge of a kind that can unite people, but the release of his own innermost powers; it was not his deepest intention to share his innermost self, but to elicit from each that which is personal and productive, the most secret treasures of his individuality, and to transform them into agitating energy; heightening of general productivity, that’s what he himself called the innermost meaning of his work.16 Nietzsche, Buber continued, proclaimed new modes of being for the human race. He provided an attractive model of people creating themselves, transcending themselves; he nurtured the human capacity to long for something beyond the horizon, for a personality on a grand scale, and not to be content with the mediocrity of the masses. From now on, man would change from being a physical, existential entity to being a participant in the ever-evolving process of creation.17 In place of the static God of the creation narrative, a new human strain would come into being: the evolving God (werdende Gott), and as Buber said, “Over and against the God of the world’s beginning he set up a formidable adversary, the becoming God to whose development we can contribute, the envisaged product of future evolutions”.18 These expressions, observations, and perceptions made Nietzsche a thinker-artist-psychologist who eluded all definition.

Mythical hermeneutics Nietzsche had a decisive influence in forming Buber’s conception of myth, in that he rehabilitated myth as the living and creative foundation of all culture.19 Gershom Scholem hit the nail on the head when he pointed to Buber’s experience of Nietzsche as the turning-point in his approach to myth. Alongside his analysis of mysticism as a creative factor in Judaism, Buber developed a no less keen interest in its mythical foundations which related to a change in appreciating the vital nature of myth. The change of assessment, common to many of Buber’s generation, [. . .] was the result of Nietzsche’s influence.20 The war that rabbinic Judaism declared on myth was praised to the skies as a campaign to rid Judaism of foreign elements. Buber recalled David Neumark, the reform rabbi who in 1894 wrote the first Hebrew essay on Nietzsche, as having written, “The history of the development of the Jewish religion is in reality the history of the wars of liberation fought both against our mythology and that of

118  The resurrection of myth others, both in the remote past and in more recent times”. Buber saw fit to correct him: “The history of the development of the Jewish religion is in fact the history of the wars between the natural creation of a mythical-monotheistic folk-religion and the rational-monotheistic religion of the writers of the Talmud”.21 Laurence Silverstein reinforces Scholem’s thesis by saying, “Buber’s turn to myth and his divergence from historical scholarship are further indication of his affinity to Nietzsche”.22 Buber developed a modern interpretation of myth which may be described as a “mythical hermeneutics”. It was a systematic, original, and sophisticated interpretation, which foreshadowed those of other famous interpreters of myth. Buberian interpretation has two aspects; the theological interpretation of the monotheistic myth in Judaism, and the historiographical interpretation of myth, which changes things and which itself changes and which stands in opposition to frozen historicism. The Haskalah, from its nineteenth-century representative Hermann Cohen to scholars of religion like Yehezkiel Kaufmann, Julius Guttmann, and Moshe David Cassuto, tried to prove that Judaism and myth are irreconcilable, and that biblical and rabbinic Judaism were entirely free of myth. Unlike them, Buber saw monotheistic myth as the very basis of his concept of Judaism. In his conception of a living monotheism, he claimed that myths were not the product of an aesthetic or psychological view of things: myths, in his opinion, were real historical memories handed down from generation to generation. Myths are memory, not imagination, and they are woven around a kernel of historical memory. Myth was seen by Buber as a living thing that is operative in every person.23 Buber thought and wrote in disciplines like philosophy, theology, and sociology, but he also had an affinity to history and anthropology. He was drawn to the history of the nineteenth century, which according to Nietzsche secularized the day of judgment by means of the concept of “progress”. It was a concept that proclaimed the liberation of man from the shackles of his God through his rational consciousness extended through time. In contradiction to Kant and Hegel, Nietzsche put forward the following paradox: man, who has been liberated from theological history, now put his trust in secular historicism as a new redeeming god.24 Religious salvation was replaced by secular salvation whose new idol was now history and its concept of progress. The historical consciousness rose like a golem against its creator: man invented historiography in order to find a meaning in history, and ended by being dominated by it. History was the successor to God and the cult of historicism was the successor to theology. Anthropological works distinguish in the case of certain societies between the historical past and the mythological past.25 They are two separate realms of time. The task of time in myth is to explain phenomena in the present and to grant legitimation to existing social and political institutions. The historical past is a past that is gone, but myth continues to operate in history: the mythical event is a precedent that recurs constantly in the course of time. The historians of ancient Greece showed that every generation tends to emphasize the features of the past that correspond to its own concerns and ideas. There is a dialectical relationship

“It came over me like a revelation”  119 between mythical time and historical time in which each fashions the other in its own image. Mythological time bestows significance and creates the basis for conservative or revolutionary forms of action in contemporary historical time, and historical time makes use for its needs of certain elements in existing myths and at the same time creates new ones.26 Historical time is the time known to us: measurable, chronological, and continuous. Mythological time has its own characteristics like the ten days of repentance, the Jewish-Israeli time between Passover – the ancient feast of liberation – and Holocaust Day. Buber created a theory of myth whose basic premise was derived from Plato who, in Buber’s words, saw myth as “the story of a divine occurrence as seen by sensory reality”.27 Elsewhere, Buber said, “We give the name of myth to every tale of a sensory occurrence that sees it as a divine and decisive occurrence and describes it as such”. The two determinant elements in this definition are the world of the divine and its description by men. Thus, sophisticated theology or the description of an ecstatic experience are not myth but expressions of causal thinking as against mythical thinking. Buber opposed the distinction between polytheistic cultures or peoples that created myths and cultures or peoples that had no myths. The idea that the Jewish people had no myths was based on the belief that the Jewish faith is monotheistic. Those who thought that myth is a primitive form of religion believed that this was a more valid and progressive position than that of those who saw myth as representing an advanced stage of humanity. The scholar of Islamic studies Isaac Yehuda Goldziher, for example, thought that myth represented the early irrational stage of the human consciousness. When human thought developed, religion abandoned its mythical sources and became entirely rational. Religion moved from the primitive world to the modern world where it could expose its mythological elements through the critical faculty.28 Rejection of a belief in the existence of myths in Judaism characterized both those who saw it as a purely rational religion and those who saw it as a humanistic religion: Aggada was regarded as a worthless plaything of the imagination, an inane literature of fables, midrash was seen as a useless collection of tendentious interpretations, Kabbala as a tasteless conglomeration of strange numbers, and, as for hassidism, it was scarcely heard of or was scornfully rejected as the product of sickly delusions. And the Bible was viewed, even by serious scholars, as something totally remote from myth.29 Buber said that at the beginning of modern scholarship, which gave itself the objective of revealing the existence of Jewish myth, “veins of precious metal” were found “here and there in all the books of the Bible”. Because it was now impossible to deny the existence of Jewish myth, scholars began to deny its originality. The mythical roots of the culture of the ancient East were considered authentic, while the Jewish mythical content was regarded as an imitation or copy. Works gradually began to be published detecting mythical elements in the Bible and it was no longer possible to deny the existence of myths there. Critics

120  The resurrection of myth therefore took a new path: a distinction was made between negative mythological Judaism which they rejected, and positive monotheistic Judaism which they adopted. Buber’s statements on monotheistic myth are an echo of the vigorous controversy in Jewish thought from the nineteenth century onwards on the place of myth in Judaism.30 The person on the other side of the fence from Buber was the biblical scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann, the most outstanding representative of the demythologizing approach to Judaism.31 He expressed in the most forceful manner the view that the revolutionary characteristic of biblical faith was its total break with mythological thinking. The eastern mythologies dealt with the origins of the gods, with stories about the gods’ creation of the world and its formation when the human race began, and the development of culture. The poems of Babylonian myth infiltrated the Israelite tribes in Canaan before the biblical faith in the One God crystallized. If traces of myth still existed in the biblical literature and religion, the biblical faith was largely characterized by a new kind of religious perception that saw the world in a non-mythological way. The idea of the God of the Israelite faith was beyond myth: that is to say, there is no story there of the formation of God, and all the foundations of pagan myth are missing, such as the birth of the god out of clay or from another god, his family pedigree, changes of rule or a divine genealogy. Not only was the Israelite god not mythological but there were no mythical images in his environment. The revolutionary consciousness of the “jealous God” was not that he was a new god but that he insisted on being unique. And in this way, the view came to be accepted that the biblical faith was supramythological, and that its task, as such, was to fight against pagan manifestations which were remains of mythological beliefs. Pagan worshippers did not distinguish between a statue and a symbol. To them, the statue was not an image or a likeness but the god himself.32 Similarly, in mythological times, written characters did not indicate speech but were speech itself. Judaism’s revolutionary abstraction was an attempt to eliminate the contentious symbols. An example of this was the affair of the golden calf. The sin connected with the calf was not the idea that God does not exist but ascribing sanctity to the symbol – the calf. God was not rejected here, but Moses’ hope that the tablets of the Law would replace the concrete symbols was disappointed. The people was not yet ready to conceive of the divinity without physical symbols. In this situation, there was no meaning to the tablets of the Law because the people was unable to assume the responsibility of accepting the yoke of heaven without some material form. The historical past passes away, but myth continues to operate. The historians demonstrate this fact where the ancient Greeks are concerned: each generation tends to emphasize the features of the past that contribute to its ideas and occupations.33 The conclusion is that mythical time determines the events of the present. A study of Greek history will show that the Greeks reconstructed the events of the past in accordance with their present needs, and a proof of this is their invention of genealogies to give legitimation to the rulers.34 Here, once again, we find a dynastic relationship between mythical time and historical time in which the

“It came over me like a revelation”  121 former fashions the latter in its image. Mythical time tends to give legitimation to the present and preserve it, while historical time tends to be renewed when there are changes in the life of the present, but for this purpose a rewriting of mythical time is required. The need to redefine the mythical phenomenon in the monotheistic context revealed a dialectical continuity between the Haskalah orientation in the nineteenth century – that of disregarding myth – and the movement to resurrect myth in the first half of the twentieth century. There is an interesting interrelationship between myth and history, the subjective mythical truth, and the objective historical truth. There is a dialectical relationship between myth and the historical present in that each molds the other in its image. The needs of the present bring about a rewriting of myth, and myth, for its part, molds the perceptions of the present. Myth gives the present meaning, but at the same time it molds itself, post factum, according to the requirements of that same present. In other words, myth is one out of a number of past events that has been chosen in order to serve the needs of the present. “Historiology”, to use Thomas Mann’s expression, is a recording of the past for the purpose of scientific knowledge while myth is the creation of the past in order to mold the present. The mythical event is seen as an event that reappears with the passage of time, and it molds it and gives it a form. There are three consequences of the biblical story of Moses in Buber.35 The early life of Moses shows the effect produced by a recognition of God’s presence, the directives to the Israelites concerning the Passover shows the effect of law as a molder of culture, and the revelation at Sinai had the effect of creating a basis of social equality among the Israelites. In viewing the story of Moses as a mythical representation of these values  – God’s presence, law, and equality  – Buber understood the myth as an invitation to repentance which each generation reapplies to itself. The myth also changes the observer and leaves its mark upon him. This is the mythical, dialogic hermeneutics between the one who remembers and the event, between the event and the memory of the observer. As a myth, the story of Moses invites every Jew in each generation to take the path that Moses did.36 Buber saw myth as a historical event that became meta-historical. For example, mythical time and consecutive time were combined among the Israelites in a continuous narrative of a chain of events and the cleavage between the pagan era and the present time disappeared. According to the present writer, this correlation derived from the absence of a real mythology in Judaism. The parts of Jewish historiography relevant to the present have a more special significance than the historical narratives not relevant to the present. One remains conscious of the exodus from Egypt, for instance, because of its connection with Passover, which is celebrated every year. The story of the flood, on the other hand, has little relevance because it has no significance for the present. Nietzsche confirmed this principle in his quotation of Goethe’s maxim: “I hate everything that merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity” [H, Introduction]. History in itself is unimportant. What is important is myth as a model of basic events and forms of existence that creates patterns according to which the past and present operate.

122  The resurrection of myth Thus, myth is revealed as the most effective force for the crystallization of culture: only when the cultural horizon is composed of myth does the formative process of the culture reach inner crystallization. Unlike the paralyzing Socraticintellectual principle, the Apollonian-artistic principle is what creates systems of life, for every fruitful and productive myth must pass through an Apollonian crystallization in order to influence the present. On the other hand, each rewriting of the past for the purposes of the present uses “Socratic” facts as raw material for the creation of the Apollonian harmony. Historicistic culture is revealed by Nietzsche and Buber to be refuted in its essence: historicism paralyzes, castrates, and kills creative life while myth is vital to an existential approach to history.37

The Jewish renaissance The young Buber was tremendously affected not only by Nietzsche’s precepts – self-overcoming, the will to power, the superman, the transvaluation of values – but also by the inspiration that the philosopher gave to restless young Jews in Eastern and Central Europe at the turn of the century, young people who wanted to create with their own hands a new, healthy, productive Judaism. In 1902, Buber, still dazzled by the attractions of the Nietzschean philosophy, published the article, “The Creators, the People and the Movement”, the opening shot in his war against political Zionism and a presage of things to come.38 Already, here he hinted at the creation of a cultural myth of a people who could become a symbol of national rebirth. The “creators” were not intellectuals or politicians but possessors of “creative cultural forces”, “hidden kings of the people”. “Productivity” meant creative participation in the culture of a particular people, but also in that of humanity as a whole. Up to a certain stage, Buber’s relationship to the Germans was parallel to his relationship with the modern Jews: both groups fought against the cultural values prevailing in their time, both of them wanted to discover their national roots and the energies hidden in the life of the people. Immersed as he was in the heroic-tragic outlook of The Birth of Tragedy, Buber applied the lessons of the Greek revival to the Jewish rebirth. For him, Zionism was more than a movement with social objectives: it was first and foremost a movement for the cultural renewal of the nation. Hans Kohn related that in 1903 Buber wrote a philosophical work that was never published, entitled “Creation as Redemption or Evolution and Revolution”. The terms “creation” and “redemption”, a Nietzschean juxtaposition, have a special significance as an acknowledgment of the state of mind of many Jewish youths who thought that the redemption of the Jewish people required creative energies, or as Paul Mendes-Flohr, basing himself on Schiller and Schelling put it, “Zionism and the aesthetic education of the Jews”.39 The image of Buber as the German Ahad Ha-Am is accepted by many commentators, but the parallel is exaggerated and misses the point.40 Buber played a prominent role in the Democratic Fraction, the group opposed to the political and diplomatic Zionism of Herzl and Nordau. Herzl sought to solve the “Jewish problem”, which he believed was caused by antisemitism, whereas Buber and Ahad Ha-Am wanted a solution to the problem of Judaism: that is to say, the creation

“It came over me like a revelation”  123 of a new cultural and mental space, secular, modern, for Judaism, which had been frozen in tradition. The positivist Ahad Ha-Am rejected the call of the Tse’irim for a radical transvaluation of the values in the Jewish agenda out of a fear of Nietzschean nihilism, while the romanticist and aesthete Martin Buber derived spiritual force for a national cultural revival from those very Nietzschean concepts. Buber called for a Kulturpolitik, a spiritual and aesthetic education of the Jews for the purpose of a political and social transformation. In his article “Zionist Politics” (1903), he asked in Nietzschean terms for a transvaluation of all aspects of [. . .] the life of the people down to the very depths. This must reach the soul [. . .] We must liberate the vital forces of the nation and grant freedom to its instincts.41 The article “The Jewish Renaissance” (1903) represents a first crystallization of cultural Zionism in the context of Buber’s activities in the Democratic Fraction and under the inspiration of Nietzsche’s thought.42 It was really a rewriting of an article he had published two years earlier in an experimental number of the journal Ost und West (East and West) (1901). Both versions owed a debt of precedence to Jacob Burkhardt and his interpretation of the Italian Renaissance – seen as a creative rebirth rather than a revival of the past – which contributed to a popularization to the debate at the turn of the century in which pupils of his like Nietzsche, Arthur de Gobineau, and Stefan George participated. For Buber, the Jewish renaissance meant the rebirth of the Jewish people in language, costume, and art. It was a renaissance because of the transformation of the Jewish fate into a national movement and a cultural rebirth in the sense of a renewal of the total human entity and not a return to old ideas and ways of life. It meant a change from an apparent existence to a real existence, from consumption to production, from learned dialectics to natural perception, from medieval asceticism to a sense of the fullness of life, from the confines of a narrow community to the freedom of the individual, from an unformed cultural potential to a well-turned and beautiful cultural creation. These were Nietzsche’s aesthetic criteria for the “Apollonian” molding that gave form to the chaotic “Dionysian”. The young Buber was totally under the influence of the Lebensphilosophie of the school of Nietzsche, Schelling, and Klages, which in place of reason – the matter of philosophy from Socrates to Hegel – emphasized will, vitality, and myth.43 Buber said that in order to understand the Jewish renaissance, a phenomenon full of joy and beauty, one has to see it as a single totality whose roots lay at the end of the eighteenth century. Two powerful movements penetrated Judaism at that time: Hassidism from within and the Enlightenment from outside, and the two of them created a dialectical synthesis with tremendous repercussions on modern Jewish history. Until the eighteenth century, the energy of the Jews was repressed not only from the outside by foreign national forces, but also from within by the tyranny of the Law (the reference was presumably to halacha). The Law trampled on all that was bright, joyful, and beautiful; dominated education; and gained unprecedented power. Personal feelings were repressed, and only activities based on the

124  The resurrection of myth Law were permitted. Creativity gave way to reliance on books of the Law. But for hundreds of years there were underground currents beneath the dominance of the Law, something for which two movements were responsible. The first was Hassidism, which demanded a greater emotional expression than the Law provided, a demand that entered into Jewish mysticism. And the second was the Haskalah, the Jewish movement of enlightenment that aimed at liberating modern thought from the traditional Law. Hassidism and the Haskalah together brought about a physical and spiritual struggle and unintentionally led to the emergence of the Jewish renaissance, as a result of which, Buber said, “slowly and gradually a new type of Jew [will develop]”. Hassidism, or the strong spiritual current that gave birth to it, formed the “selfrenewing Jew” according to the Nietzschean Buber. The Hassidic world was bereft of sentimentality but was full of mysticism which had power and feeling, and created the transition to the here-and-now, allowing life to be exposed to the concrete and to a living, authentic and decisive experience of renewal, a new form of the ecstatic, an active sense of holiness between the human entity and God. Creativity (Schaffen), a long-drawn-out process, is a phenomenon operative in all times and places through human beings working in anarchy and love. The aim of the Jewish Law is to transform the human entity into the Law itself (man as Law: that is a prolonged echo of Nietzsche). The Haskalah, for its part, opposed Hassidism and rabbinic Judaism because both in its opinion were based on faith rather than on knowledge. The Haskalah, which sprang up in the name of knowledge and European civilization, wanted to enlighten but was artificial, wished to popularize but did not succeed. The Haskalah demanded the self-determination of the autonomous man based on thinking and not on tradition, desired the Europeanization of the Jews and sought to revive Hebrew and universal ideas. In these respects the Haskalah was an important factor in the intellectual revival of the Jewish people. The Talmudic Jew, said Buber, was passive, suffered persecution without complaint or pride, with sealed lips and a desensitized heart. In his passive attitudes and actions there was not only grandeur but misery and pathos. By contrast, the new Jew of the Emancipation who followed the line of thought of Spinoza, was audacious, acted freely, opposed halacha and behaved in accordance with his thoughts and feelings. The world of creativity had been disregarded by him for too long, and now he sought purification and self-redemption. But many people of the Haskalah who at the beginning of the nineteenth century adopted a cosmopolitan outlook soon found that instead of gaining spiritual freedom they were destined to assimilation and absorption by other peoples. This pathological crisis was due to geographical dispersion and the emancipation following the French Revolution, and as a result, the Jewish national movement sought to revive the latent energies of the nation. Buber expressed it in Nietzschean terms: “If we consider the renaissance as an organism, the national idea is the consciousness and the national movement is the will-to-power”. The Jewish national movement saw its mission as creating a new Jewish community in Palestine, and it sought to do so not for Zionist but for humanitarian reasons. True cultural activity spontaneously brought forth territorial fruits and at the end of the day gained a country.

“It came over me like a revelation”  125 The young Buber took his first steps on a dual path, the Nietzschean and the Jewish, as expressed by Akiva Ernst Simon. The closing years of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth witnessed his intellectual and national development on parallel lines, lines which converged in a single trajectory. These were fascination with the German philosopher who first taught him the “philosophy of life”, and his involvement in the Zionist movement, which, among other things, found expression in his editing the journal Der Jude (The Jew). Each of these enthusiasms nourished the other, but his disappointment in them was also mutual. The Nietzschean nihilism finally made him turn his back on his former teacher of philosophy, and the Zionist leaders’ focus on politics and neglect of the cultural aspect caused him to abandon official Zionist activities. He eventually admitted his dual disappointment, in the philosopher and in the movement. His demand for a rebirth and renewal of Judaism and his hope for “something astounding and gigantic which would not be a continuation or rectification but a repentance and an overturning” ended with the feeble declaration “slight changes”, “audacity of soul and the power of sacrifice” led to “entering into contracts”, and “the longing for a new life of heroism” acquired a pathos exemplified in the figure of Nietzsche: The most tragic example is that of a man in whom these feelings were more powerful than they were in any other man, but who was nevertheless able to liberate himself from this course of development: Friedrich Nietzsche.44 It is not surprising, said Simon, that Buber’s divorce from Nietzsche also appeared in one of the “Speeches on Judaism”, in which he “bore witness to Nietzsche’s tragic failure. Later, Buber was to speak of the far greater tragedy that arose out of the doctrine of the superman. For in reality this doctrine was superimposed on the model of biological development, and this in turn was superimposed on history with the same spurious success”.45

Messianic myth In his article “Buber or Ben-Gurion”, Akiva Ernst Simon, the pupil and friend of Martin Buber and Ben-Gurion’s opponent, gave a good description of the relationship between the philosopher and the statesman: It seems that these two, the philosopher and the statesman, may be considered two of the greatest Jews of the first half of the twentieth century. Some have said that they complemented one another, that each one had what the other lacked; others see them as the personification of two contrary outlooks which cannot be reconciled.46 The intellectual and the prime minister were on opposite sides of the fence on many political questions: Buber’s position on the Arab question as shown in his membership of the radical leftist intellectual group Brit Shalom (1925–1933) and

126  The resurrection of myth the Ihud, founded in 1924; the affair surrounding Ben-Gurion’s accusation of the leftist Israeli scholar Aaron Cohen (1910–1980) who was sentenced and imprisoned for spying; the nuclearization of the Middle East; the execution of Adolf Eichmann, who was trialed at Israel (1961); and other controversial subjects. Buber’s intellectual and scholarly interest in the Messianic myth was intense, and it can also be said to have been methodical. Messianism and its universal essence were the very foundation of his thought. Buber’s methodical treatment of Messianism encouraged the idea that his dialogic approach to philosophical inquiry was an authentic philosophical method. In his early Three Speeches about Judaism – “Judaism and the Jews” (1909), “Judaism and Mankind” (1910), and “The Renewal of Judaism” (1910) – we find a peculiarly Buberian combination of the idea of redemption as a cardinal principle for the individual with the Nietzschean concept of the will to power. In “The Renewal of Judaism” (1910) he stated, “Messianism is the most original and profound idea in Judaism”. Buber’s enthusiasm for the First World War was also, like that of his generation, ascribable to his attraction to Nietzsche’s Lebensphilosophie. At least three books by Buber – The Kingdom of Heaven (1932), The Teaching of the Prophets (1942), and The Messiah (1964) – dealt with the connection between the Messianic myth and the philosophy of history. They were preceded by the lecture, “The Messianic Mystery”, given on the 6th of March 1925 in Berlin on the occasion of the opening of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Theodor Dreyfus, the translator of the lecture, declared that it is not by chance that Buber chose a “Messianic” theme for his lecture in honor of the opening of the Hebrew University. The central axis of his system is creating a true spiritual life in each and every society until the spirit guides the whole of humanity.47 In 1927, Buber gave a speech in memory of Ahad Ha-Am in which he pointed out at an early stage the use that Zionism made of the Messianic myth. He protested against the secularization and nationalization of religion, and warned against the transformation of religious language into nationalist language. It was the same danger of the banalization of the sacred tongue that Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem had complained of early in the twentieth century, and Simon, Baruch Kurzweil, and Leibowitz were to protest against in the middle of the century. This is what Buber said, All national movements are merely copies of religious movements [. . .]. All trends of liberation are simply secular reprints of longings for redemption [. . .]. These reprints are unlikely to be particularly faithful. One cannot transfer the qualities of religious language to nationalist language. Every mixture creates a confusion which is disastrous.48 Buber’s book The Kingdom of Heaven (1932), his main essay on Messianism, appeared during his period of activity in Brit Shalom. Right at the beginning of

“It came over me like a revelation”  127 the book, he declared, “The most important, in my opinion, of all the problems which have been ripening within me and which I now want to solve, has been the problem of the development of Messianism among the people of Israel”.49 One can see this question “ripening” in Buber in a series of lectures he gave at the University of Frankfurt in the winter of 1924–1925 and in a course he gave about four years later at Ponte Teresa. In the introduction to The Kingdom of Heaven, the first volume in his Messianic trilogy, he described the first part of his program, an examination of the popular religious concept of the divine kingdom in ancient Israel. He expressed his intention to explore in the future (which he did in the two succeeding volumes, The Teaching of the Prophets and The Messiah) the relationship between the sanctified character of the king of Israel as the Messiah of God and this concept, and the way in which these two elements were transferred from the sphere of history to the sphere of eschatology. His dialectical argument was that the Jewish and general eschatological hope originated in hope in history, and with a growing disappointment in history it became eschatological. Eschatological faith comes out of historical faith. Historical phenomena create the vision of the end of days and become myth: the Messianic myth is both the medium and the representation of the end of days. According to Buber in his article “Jewish Myth”, the Jewish Messianic myth signified a belief in “the existence of a connection between God and the world through the absolute rule/kingdom of God”.50 This unique faith of the people of Israel was based on a real historical memory which had been given mythical clothing. The Messianic quality of the Jewish tradition is not to be understood religiously but nationally: the national mission of the people of Israel is the universalizing of this Messianic factor. The main area in which Buber investigated Jewish myth was Hassidism. In his book, For the Sake of Heaven, he contrasted the active Messianism of the “seer of Lublin” with the “holy Jew”, who embodied the opposite pole, love, and compassion: “One must pity the human beings who make a god of their desires, for it is hard for them to be with the Living God”.51 It is not difficult to see on whose side Buber is on. He warns against the Promethean arrogance of the man who seeks to rise against his Maker: “We are not entrusted with the areas within the purview of holiness but with the area which is not holy in order to correct it”. Give to God the things that are God’s and to man the things that are man’s. The “seer of Lublin” was concerned with the Messianic urge, and the “holy Jew” was concerned with human responsibility. These were the two aspects of the Jewish idea of redemption. One can distinguish between the utopian principle and the Messianic principle in Buber’s teaching: utopian life concerns people operating in the historical reality; Messianic life relates to the end of history. Utopia is “a place which is entirely good”; eschatology envisages “a time which is entirely good”. Both elements – the utopian and the Messianic – appear in his writings. Buber did not live in an ivory tower, and his writing reflected the Jewish and general environment in which he lived. He related that he wrote For the Sake of Heaven during the Second World War. He said that “the signs of a false Messianism abroad and at home” are what drove him to write the book, in which he

128  The resurrection of myth described how “I received the decisive push when suddenly, half-dreaming, I saw the figure of a false messenger, mentioned in the first chapter of my book – a sort of devil with a peculiar Goebbels-like face”52 Already on the first of May 1933, when Hitler came to power, he declared at a public meeting in Frankfurt, The Jewish belief in the redemption of the world does not mean that this world will be replaced with another, but it is a belief in a new world in the same place. There is no concept of this world and the world-to-come in the Hebrew language [.  .  .]. We are not obliged to have a special “Messianic” policy. But there is a kind of participation in public life in which we direct ourselves towards the kingdom of heaven while dealing with the world and politics.53 National Socialism was not the only false Messianism for Buber. In his lectures at the Hebrew University in 1938, he spoke of the “scientific Messianism’s” dangers, caused by the dialectics of Marx and Hegel. The Messianic goal, he said, was liable to justify any means of attaining it. The source of this secular Messianism was in Christianity and the apocalyptics of predestination. The secular man, with his Promethean philosophical thrust, is sure that “this very defective world is moving towards its total rectification”. Buber observed that “Messianism was secularized” in the Marxist philosophy of history. The Marxist Messianism was the continuation of Christian secularism, “a utopian modern metamorphosis of apocalyptics”.54 Buber and Albert Camus both saw the dangers of the “scientific Messianism”. In his function as editor of translated works of literature for the Mossad Bialik publishing house in Israel, Buber wrote to Camus and asked his permission to publish his L’Homme Revolté in Hebrew: “Your book L’Homme Revolté is of such importance to human existence at the present time that I would like to recommend it to Mossad Bialik”. (Incidentally, Ben-Gurion planned to edit the Mossad Bialik translated literature series with Buber after he retired from politics.) Three weeks later, on the 22nd of February 1952, Camus replied, “I read your book I and Thou with much appreciation, and I did not expect to receive from you something that would give me such pleasure and do me such an honor”.55 In Buber’s library, there were two books with signed dedications by Camus. In La Chute was written, “To Mr. Martin Buber, painter of the portrait of our time, with respect and admiration”, and in Discours de Suède (Camus’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech) was written, “To Martin Buber from an admirer”. Marxism was a “scientific Messianism” as understood by Camus. Camus had grasped that the lofty visions were a nightmare, that Prometheus had betrayed his Messianic mission. Marxism had a value as one of the legitimate heirs of the Promethean urge, the modern revolt, and Stalinism had corrupted that value. The Marxist Promethean aspiration had exceeded the limits of humanity. After the Second World War, Buber testified before the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry which visited Palestine in 1946. He declared to the Committee that Messianism is “the most productive and most paradoxical of human

“It came over me like a revelation”  129 ideas”. Its universal mission is to command “every generation to contribute to the upbuilding of the future”. The original aim of the people of Israel, added Buber, was Messianic-ideological: “Action towards the coming of the kingdom of God on earth”. This was the faith that united the Jews in exile and which gave them the hope of eventually returning to Zion. The historian Shalom Ratsabi pointed out that in Buber’s statement to the Committee he stressed first and foremost the special nature of Jewish nationalism which aimed at renewing the connection between the people of Israel and its land within the framework of the Messianic process, which seeks universal redemption. Its first consideration, therefore, is not statehood but the building of a model society, the precondition to which is the concentration of the national forces capable of renewing their creative power in Eretz-Israel.56 Buber explained to the Committee that the Zionist enterprise in Eretz-Israel in the 1940s was also “important for the future of mankind”.57 Only in Zion could the Jews realize the Messianic idea through their universal mission. The Messianic people were seen as the enemy of anti-Messianic antisemitism, and it was consequently natural to attack the messengers of Messianism. A year before his testimony to the Committee of Enquiry, Buber spoke on Dutch radio about the special nature of Zionism. Zionism, he said, represented a people that had unity and faith, both of which had a connection with antiquity: “These are two things that are as one for the beginning of redemption, for the beginning of the reformation of the world in the Realm of the Almighty”.58 Together with this idea that Zionism was a means to a universal end, he adopted a point of view opposed to the nationalization and politicization of the Messianic principle. He called for “political work”, which meant “a politics of depoliticization”, saying that the domination of Jewish-Arab relations by politics would lead to a national state. He thought a bi-national state was preferable, and hence his membership of Brit Shalom.59 He explained in a letter to Mahatma Gandhi in February 1939, “We do not have a specific Messianic policy, but that does not mean that politics are outside the sphere of holiness”.60 Akiva Ernst Simon gave a good description of Buber’s dual path: Buber’s return to the Jewish people took place under two signs: the sign of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the sign of the leader Theodor Herzl. From Nietzsche he received an antidote to an aesthetic softening, an impetus towards a masculine and heroic mode of life, aggressive spiritual action and an alert recognition of vital forces that would infuse new blood into a pallid intellectual culture. Herzl he saw as a living symbol of pure primordial redemption, [. . .] a sort of wondrous materialization of a Nietzschean figure who suddenly appeared among the Jewish people [. . .] but this uncritical admiration of the leader very quickly waned. This happened at the very same time as his sobering off from the intoxication of his brief attachment to Nietzsche’s philosophy. When the youth began to return to his people, the

130  The resurrection of myth cast-aside world of his grandfather returned to him, the world of Judaism rich in content, steeped in moral and conceptual claims.61

Jewish myth Buber went back to Plato once again in his article “Jewish Myth”, treating him as a starting-point and as something that had to be refuted. While Plato saw mythos (myth) as being opposed to logos (the word), or, in other words, as mendacious, irrational, and immoral, for Buber myth related the truth about the revelation of God on earth. He claimed that the Jews related their history solely through myth – the stories of the Bible. From the pillar of cloud to the giving of the Law at Sinai “the continuity of the mythical narrative never ceases”.62 The continuing subject of post-biblical narrative was built up through this history. Buber distinguished between the “cultured” man whose thinking is scientific, rational and causal, and the “primitive” man who feels the irrational quality of experience.63 One experience is not seen in comparison to another, but each experience stands on its own, and is the sign “of a connection between hidden things beyond causality, reflecting the reality of the absolute. He [the primitive man] links together what takes place in the absolute, divine world and turns it into myth”. Causal thought is based on compartmentalization and the separation of experiences in order to make a comparison between them, but mythical thought is total, not relative with regard to other experiences but relates to inner content and absolute significance. The narrative of the “primitive” man guided by mythical thought is the narrative of an absolute occurrence without any causal function; he sees each happening as something that does not have to be grasped by thought, defined, or conceptualized but as an absolute reality: “Mythical perception reveals a truth that is deeper and more complex than causal truth”.64 These words of Buber’s strongly recall Georges Sorel’s theory of myths. Buber acknowledged his acquaintance with Sorel’s teachings in his article “People and Leader” (1942), in which he explained how the term “myth” came to be used in a political sense: The source of this concept is to be found in the teachings of the syndicalist theoretician Georges Sorel about social myth. He was a man who had no small influence on Mussolini (although only on his tactical positions and propagandist techniques) and, altogether, had a bad influence on that generation.65 The significance of myth to Sorel is thus its mystification of political activity, the fact that it energizes and motivates the masses.66 Myth’s political effectiveness is not dependent on its being realized; it is the very belief in the myth that is the important factor. Sorel claims that the importance of the belief in myth in various periods is that this belief turned the myth into a political force. To take the example of Christian myth, even though the idea of a catastrophe in the pagan world, the return of Jesus and the rule of the saints never came true as expected, this did not weaken people’s belief in it.67 Another example is the myth of the

“It came over me like a revelation”  131 Reformation: even though it seems unimportant to us today, there is no denying its force in the past. The myth of the French Revolution, too, would not have been possible without visions that were very far from reality. And with respect to the myth of the unification of Italy, Mazzini’s vision contributed to Italian unification more than Cavour’s politics did. Therefore, a knowledge of what the myths contain in the way of details which will actually form part of the history of the future is then of small importance; they are not astrological almanacs; it is even possible that nothing which they contain will come to pass.68 Myth, as language, mediates between man and the universe, and provides a wider view. Current events are seen in an eternal context with the aid of myth. Thus, the historical becomes super-historical, and the myth of the Greek tragedy turns into a super-historical example of the art. Sophocles, Aeschylus and Homer create the language of the myth. Their creations  – Oedipus, Prometheus, and Ulysses – are transformed by the language of the myth into super-historical concepts which express man’s immanent problems such as suffering, revolt, and loneliness. The constant return of man’s problems through the eternal myth language typifies the victory of the super-historical over the historical and of the immanent over the transcendental. Man’s participation in violent lifestyles through the myth rescued him from his depression and endowed his fleeting life with metaphysical significance. Myth exposed the finality of life, but with the artistry of false legends, gods, and heroes, gave life a metaphysical dimension. Unlike Giambattista Vico, Emile Durkheim, and later Ernst Cassirer, Sorel did not confine himself to the phenomenology of social myths in history and contemporary society, but created a political mythology for French and European society.69 If the fuel that activated history was not ideology but myth, then it was necessary to create a new myth to revitalize the stagnant political life of the turn of the nineteenth century. The proposed cure for the lethargy of the proletariat was an activating political violence, of the type which Sorel and his disciples on both the radical left and the radical right had come to regard as the generator of the historical process. The myth of violence, they believed, would reinvigorate the militancy of socialism and nationalism and spur these on to a new and dynamic course of action. What mattered to Sorel was not ideological content, but the test of authenticity constituted by violence and heroic action. In his paean of praise for early heroic civilizations, his condemnation of the illusions of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and his promotion of the myth of the general strike, Sorel was searching for a heroic and militant ethos. Sorelian myth should be understood in a new way, as a means not to some ideological purpose but to mobilize heroic action, regarded as an end in itself. In our time, Claude Lévi-Strauss has described this longing for myth as follows: The need for a comprehensive explanation is a basic need of human nature. We shall never be free from the need for mythology. I  might say that the

132  The resurrection of myth crisis in Western civilization is largely due to the fact that we are collectively unable to have a comprehensive explanation of this kind which mythology provided humanity with for such a long time.70 Already before Claude Lévi-Strauss, who said that mythological thinking dominates history and that we make a mythological use of history, Buber declared that the Bible itself represents a “mythicization” of history which continued until the time of the French Revolution and afterwards. History became the arena in which myth was fabricated. The gods created in the ancient mythologies of Mesopotamia or Olympus were replaced by modern nationalism which secularized myth. Today, we could apply Buber’s assertion to globalization, fundamentalism, and the electronic and virtual media, and say that although they are human phenomena in the sense that they are the product of people who are secular and rational, reflecting the consciousness and actions of modern man, the problem with these post-modern embodiments of the Promethean revolution is that they unleashed forces liable to blur man’s critical faculty, forces that could rise against their makers like a golem. The technological or fundamentalist or totalitarian myth might prevail over man’s capacity to control it. Buber saw that the importance of myths for Sorel lay in their mystification of political action as a spur, a stimulus in arousing the masses. The political effectiveness of the myth lies not in its realization but in the faith, one has in it. Buber wrote, By the term “social myth”, Sorel means the depiction of a future event, a depiction aimed at the inner inclination of the masses, suited to their needs and desires and able to rouse them to battle, to some concrete action such as a strike. The main thing here, as Sorel explicitly says, is not the question of whether the depiction has some basis in reality, or even partly so, or whether it is merely a product of the popular imagination: the main thing is simply its power of motivation.71 Sorel finds the solution to the question of the psychological motivation of the masses in the notion of the social myth. The masses are consumers of myth, while their leaders are its producers. Sorel does not accept Plato’s dichotomy between the philosopher-king and the ignorant masses, since he does not consider the actions of the masses to be irrational. Rather, he believes that the masses motivated by myth have a collective rationale of their own, which he calls “social myth”. Myth is thus designed for social purposes. Cassirer explains that in the past myths were linked with a passive conception that the cosmos was given to people, while myths in the present are not handed on by tradition but rather belong to the society that constructs them through its own rationale. Myth is not an isolated factor in people’s social and cultural life, but constitutes part of a ritual; it also becomes an explanation of the ritual in the sense that it allows people to understand what they are doing. This function of explanation does not hold for physical phenomena but only for human activities.72 It would seem that Cassirer’s

“It came over me like a revelation”  133 interpretation was based on the works of Vico; Durkheim too believed that it is not Nature but society that is the natural field for the growth of myth, and that the elements of myth are projections of people’s social life which make Nature the image of the social world. Buber was early to distinguish between pagan myth, in which man bowed down to an image, and the monotheistic myth of Judaism in which man redeemed God.73 Pagan myth, in his opinion, is the narrative of the gods’ interpretation of their histories, their origins, and their relationships, while Jewish myth is the monotheistic narrative of Judaism found in the books of the Bible. For instance, in Gideon’s speech in the Book of Judges one could say that the sacred legend was memory that had become myth. The scholar Ron Margolin has observed that the very existence of the mythicization of history in the Bible prevents a compartmentalization between the legendary-imaginary element and historical-actual element.74 Myth has served as a medium to preserve a religious perception of history from the time of the Bible onwards. Already in 1910, the year of the publication of “Jewish Myth”, Buber began to discuss of the sin of Adam, a reflection eventually published in his article “Pictures of Good and Evil”. This continuous concern with Jewish myth as a kernel of collective memory shows that Buber was consistent in his investigation of myth. The myth, which does not establish the discourse with God but preserves it in the memory, is based on a real historical event, which remains in the consciousness and is constantly renewed in passing from one era to another. The thing that happened, said Buber, had its effect, and the event continues to work in men’s minds.75 Thus, myth is a mode of consciousness, a prism in which a dialogue between man and God is carried on. The dialogue between the physical “I” and the metaphysical “Thou” is carried on through the biblical tales which are like energies nourishing the resurgence of the monotheistic faith. Myth is the medium of the encounter of the physical and the metaphysical, the subject and object. Moreover, for Buber, myth is a precedent that recurs again and again. The biblical story of original sin is an echo of the process whereby the myth passes through human history, and in this way, its meaning is revealed: the recognition of evil as a basic element of human existence. Paul Ricoeur sees this myth as an a-historical prototype of human evil.76 The myth transcends the original event that happened in history and places the experience of Israel within a universal context applying to all times and places. Mircea Eliade likewise suggests seeing myth as a continual recurrence of initial actions.77 Buber’s approach is that the most important thing about the stories in the Bible is not the stories themselves, but rather that they present an occasion to confront them, to experience them in a contemporary way. They are not so much “historiology”, to use Thomas Mann’s expression, or a chronicle as in the Book of Chronicles, as a conceptual, ritual, and narrative foundation for a reflection on the encounter of I and Thou. The uniqueness of the Jewish mythology is shown by the fact that Buber placed the myth on a basis of metaphysical causality instead of empirical causality. Instead of the causing party operating in an objective reality there was a hidden connection with divine revelation.78 The biblical perception was that divine

134  The resurrection of myth Providence held sway over the world and overman, but now a deeper and more original approach came into view, that of “the influence of man and his actions on the fate of God”.79 Man molds God’s fate through his own life. In religious existentialism, man creates God and his world: “Every living person is deeply involved in the myth of God”.80 This is a revolutionary approach that turns things on their head: kabbalistic and Hassidic myth redeems God, or in other words creates him. Buber rejected the distinction between myth and modernity accepted by the “Science of Judaism” (Jüdische Wissenschaft), and took a revolutionary step – the modernization of myth. He recognized a modern consciousness, a consciousness that was self-aware, in relation to Jewish myth: it was the biblical narrative that created the image of God, and not the opposite. It was not only Hassidism that envisaged the redemption of God: the Kabbala also thought that God could be redeemed through human reflection and directed action. This is a supremely modern approach, or perhaps one should say, a revolutionary consciousness whose existence created modernism. This is a Promethean self-perception in which man with his own hands creates his world, his outlook – pagan or monotheistic – the objects of his desire, his values, his ideologies, and his myths. Although Buber focused on the individual when describing the first biblical myths, the “I-Thou” encounter pervaded the whole life of the Jewish community. The social function of religious myth becomes clear when one examines the connection between myth and ritual. Theodor Reik believes that the myths in Genesis were derived from ancient rituals, and, following Freud, claims that when psychanalysis reveals “the truth about myth”, it is explaining its link to ritual, for myth hoards up memories of the past both as an echo of a social event that really happened and as a human response to that event.81 In Freud’s interpretation of myth, which is expressed in totems and rituals, one finds certain forms of prohibition and commandment: patricide, for instance, produces myths and rituals of selfcreation.82 Claude Lévi-Strauss, a well-known scholar of totemism, points out the difficulty arising from the fact that totemistic institutions not only involve conceptual systems but also actions.83 Reik points out the linguistic affinity of “Adam” and adama (Hebrew for “earth”) in the legend of Adam and Eve, an affinity Buber already remarked on, but, unlike Buber, Reik focuses on the psychological and social significance of the way that myth grew out of the collective consciousness. The earliest roots of Jewish myth, the covenant with God, are in Buber’s opinion to be found in a social event. According to him, it was not a particular prophet but a whole people that participated in the event that produced this profound religious experience. Buber traced the experiences of the Jewish people via the biblical myths. Moses, for example, was a leader who led his people to freedom from slavery, who gave them laws and customs, and finally brought them to the promised land.84 This meta-myth may be divided into secondary myths: there are sections dealing with the biography of the leader, the development of the nation, and a universal model of humanity. These secondary parts are called aggadot (legends), and not myths. The aggada is a late form of Jewish myth. In comparing “the God of pure myth” with “the God of aggada”, Buber claimed that the latter

“It came over me like a revelation”  135 was responsible for the myth of “I and Thou”. Aggada and myth are not opposing narratives; aggada is more authentic than myth in its characterization of human life. The story of Moses is seen by Buber as a narrated aggadic myth: the story of early Israel from its beginnings as a people of slaves in Egypt to its crystallization as an independent nation related as a series of mythical narratives.

Political theology Like Gershom Scholem who saw the inspiration of Nietzsche in Buber’s positive view of myth, Grete Schaeder wrote in the introduction to the volume of Buber’s letters she edited: “In Buber’s heroic pathos with regard to the greatness of the past and the recovery of its mythology, one hears an echo of Nietzsche’s voice”.85 In the pioneering Zionist enterprises in Palestine, Schaeder discerned a “cult of creative action of a Nietzschean kind”. And indeed, like Rabbi Abraham Kook, who saw the pioneers as furthering the Messianic idea, Buber thought that although the pioneers did not intend to continue the Jewish tradition, they did continue it in practice and through their labor continued to fulfill the very same purpose. Although the pioneers did not acknowledge their affinity with the Patriarchs, this connection existed nevertheless. However, the values represented by the pioneers were being voided of their content and were now becoming “national slogans”. Buber protested against this nullification of the “added value” of the “purpose”, which constituted Zionism’s universal Messianic dimension. Less than ten years later, at an international intellectual gathering which took place in Jerusalem in the summer of 1965, Buber again protested at the subordination of the theological to the political and at the secularizing tendencies of Ben-Gurion’s Messianism: “The spirit in all his ideas and visions is degraded and becomes a matter of politics” “Political theology” is an old concept which made its appearance with Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE), but the modern discourse on the subject only began with the appearance of Carl Schmitt’s Politische Theologie (1922) and Walter Benjamin’s early articles. Eminent thinkers like Leo Strauss, Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Bloch, Karl Löwith, Erich Voeglin, Hans Jonas, Ernst Kantorowicz, Jacob Taubes, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben engaged in a fascinating discussion of the subject, and in so doing cast a new light on major political events of the modern age.86 Modern Jewish scholars of religion and prominent Zionist thinkers like Buber were close to the theological-political tradition. Buber, who was strongly attracted to the Messianic phenomenon, warned of its consequences in the sphere of practical politics. He was ambivalent about political theology already in the 1920s, first in Europe and later in Palestine. The danger reflects the crisis of legitimacy of modernity resulting from secularization, as we can see for example from the works of Hans Blumenberg and Jürgen Habermas.87 This was also the problem of Zionism when it arose and of the State of Israel when it was established. What would provide a new legitimization after the disappearance of religious authority? Long before them were Scholem and Buber aware to this problem. They were

136  The resurrection of myth concerned that modern society in its secularism had lost all sense of the relationship between the sacred and the profane, between morality, religion, and practical life. Walter Benjamin, for his part, considered the dialectical affinity between the secular, political hope of liberation and the Messianic hope of redemption. The Israeli historian Uriel Tal described the challenge posed by theology as follows: On the one hand it requires one to take up a position with regard to political and social affairs, and on the other hand, because its authority is metaphysical and thus absolute, there is a danger that adopting such a position will sanctify politics. Religion is liable to encroach on politics and politics is liable to encroach on religion.88 David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the Israeli state and the first prime minister, on the one hand and Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, Chief Rabbi of Eretz-Yisrael, on the other are good examples of different varieties of political theology who had some affinity to Nietzschean thought.89 In some ways, they were on opposite sides of the fence. The former, a political leader, did not hesitate to appropriate the sacred, to mobilize hallowed myths, and to harness them to the task of building the state; the latter, a religious mentor, did not hesitate to appropriate the profane, to mobilize Zionist pioneers, and to harness them to mystical speculations concerning the coming of the Messiah. Each had an essentially different starting-point from the other, but the common denominator between them was the raising of the profane to the level of the sacred: the plowman became a sacred vessel of Judaism and a central element in the process of redemption. For a short while, there was a kind of meeting between these two opposite outlooks, but from that time onwards, their paths again divided. Rabbi Kook turned towards transcendental Messianism, which relied on the Ruler of the Universe, and Ben-Gurion turned towards Promethean Messianism, which relied on the sovereignty of man. In both cases, there was a definite fusion between the world of the sacred and the world of the profane, and both men had a clear political theology, but Ben-Gurion was the most extreme expression of secular Messianism and worked for a politicization of the theological, while Rabbi Kook was the most extreme expression of religious Messianism and worked for a theologization of politics. In founding the state, Ben-Gurion had made the most significant attempt at nationalizing the Jewish Messianic concept. Zionism was a historical experiment in nationalizing religious concepts and metamorphosing them into the secular sphere. Ben-Gurion brought the matter to its ultimate conclusion in his attempt to nationalize the Bible and Messianism. Mamlachtiut (etatism), Ben-Gurion’s act of nationalization in many spheres of life, was a broad, comprehensive, and multi-faceted secular ideology which took hold of religious myths and harnessed them to a project of statehood. In the middle, between Rabbi Kook and Ben-Gurion, were Buber and the religious intellectuals who were repelled by the political theologies of both these giants. The religious intellectuals saw the theo-political detonator which the

“It came over me like a revelation”  137 Messianic idea was likely to become. They preceded the secular intellectuals and warned at an early stage against Ben-Gurion’s Messianic vision because this challenge had been imposed on them even earlier, in 1930’s, when they were exposed to the explosive interlacing of worlds in the political theology of Rabbi Kook. They had been there before: they felt that Ben-Gurion was playing with fire, and the fact that this did not frighten him did not make it any less dangerous.90 The rise of Zionism was a turning-point in the transition from transcendental Messianism to Promethean Messianism. From the time of the Bar-Kochba revolt of 132 CE – the last act representing a fusion of Jewish sovereignty and the Messianic vision before the exile – until the appearance of Zionism, the faith of many Jews for nearly two millennia was characterized by what might be termed a “transcendental Messianism”. In this form of Messianism, redemption was made dependent on a supernatural authority and the end of history was postponed. The concept of redemption was unconnected with the will or actions of men. The historical process was seen in an apocalyptic and a-historical perspective. The end of history in this context was an event that was hidden, from the human point of view, but also predetermined. The limited function of the Jew in the Middle Ages was to be content with hastening the redemption, but the redemption itself was in the hands of the kingdom of heaven. This situation was to change in the modern era, although the change did not take place overnight. The nationalization of the Messianic idea was a dual dialectical process. It restored the idea of the universal Messianism to its original carriers, to a national vanguard which had formerly been the agent of the Messianic tradition in Western culture. Now, dwelling once again in its national home, it could disseminate this idea among the nations. Thus, having such a role, Israeli society would make itself fit to be worthy of the vision. A Messianism nationalized for a universal end would first of all set about creating a society with an appropriate moral ethics.91 The building of the new Jewish sovereignty was not only a means of mobilization but involved the creation of a new national ideology. What would the significance of the State be from now on? How would it look in the eyes of the world? What kind of connection would there be between this State and the Jewish diasporas? In order to answer these questions, Ben-Gurion began to formulate his secular Messianic vision. With his sharp political instinct, he understood that the young State had to be given a sense of solidarity; its self-image required a “surplus value”, a special quality which would distinguish it from other nations, and a sense of being the center of gravity in relation to the diaspora. The vision he promoted was revolutionary by any standards: a young nation – in fact, a settlement lacking population and resources, which had only just arisen from the ruins of destruction and the struggle for independence – carrying on its shoulders the Messianic gospel to the peoples of the world! As soon as the Jewish State arose, Buber declared that a moral “boundary line” was necessary. The state, he believed, was not an end in itself, and was justified only if it produced a “Hebrew humanism” – i.e., a genuine rebirth, the renewal of a living tradition, as little injustice as possible and a striving towards wholeness and the categorical imperative. This was the “purpose”, the aim of the original Zionist vision.

138  The resurrection of myth Ben-Gurion’s political theology gave rise to a stormy Messianic debate in which one of the most profound and fascinating discussions on the collective identity and self-image of the new Israelis took place.92 This debate between BenGurion and the Israeli intellectuals took place at the time of the birth of the state in the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, and accompanied the building of the Israeli nation. The controversy did not spring up in a vacuum but was rooted in various historiographical interpretations of the Messianic idea in general philosophy, Jewish thought, Zionist movement, and Israeli politics. Buber was one of the outstanding participants in the meeting with the writers and intellectuals arranged by Ben-Gurion in 1949.93 He expressed the fear that Messianism would be nationalized, and its universal aspect would be neutralized and profaned. Ben-Gurion answered, “I am in agreement with the great in seeing the Messianic vision as one of the foundation-stones of Judaism”, and he agreed that “the Messianic vision does not separate the redemption of Israel from the redemption of humanity”.94 Ben-Gurion thought that, unlike himself and Buber, the young people, workers, and intellectuals in Israel did not always recognize the Messianic vision as such, although it lived within them. He acknowledged that the political theology of the Messianic vision was shared by him, the statesman, and the philosopher. Buber, in his letter to Gandhi mentioned earlier, had also opposed compartmentalization: “We shall be able to labor for the kingdom of heaven only if we labor in all the spheres allotted us”. He believed that the modern world suffered from a sense of alienation precisely because of the dichotomy between the religious dimension and the secular, between the sacred and the profane. In his article “Hebrew Humanism”, he stated that the roots of political theology, which did not recognize an artificial compartmentalization, were to be found in the Bible.95 He thought that a renewed study of the Bible might bring Israeli nationhood closer to the universal Messianic principle in which it was so lacking. Buber and other important Israeli intellectuals saw the dangers inherent in a Messianism of State joined to political power. They witnessed the Kibiyeh operation of 1953 and the colonialist adventure of 1956; some apprehensively followed the nuclear project which was coming into being far from the eyes of the crowd; they perceived the increasing strength of the industrial-military complex in Israel; they observed the younger generation of politicians who surrounded the “old man”, Ben-Gurion, casting angry looks at the Minister of Defense, Lavon, who was seen as really representing the civilian sector; they saw the launching of the “Shavit” rocket at the height of an election campaign. All these facts were visible to the Jerusalem intellectuals who were not at all close to the army. It is against this background that the vicissitudes of the “affair” may be understood. The intellectuals were alarmed by the Promethean golem which the State seemed likely to give rise to, and no less by its leader who did not shrink from using the power of the State. Ben-Gurion, for his part, was determined in the stand he took and was not frightened of joining political power to Promethean Messianism. Although he thought that atomic weaponry might be a two-edged sword, he was not afraid of linking power and ideology as such. It should be remembered that he was a product of Zionism, which sought to give the Jews the power to

“It came over me like a revelation”  139 shape a reality in their own image. This was Ben-Gurion’s sphere of action and in this arena of power wedded to ideas he was an outstanding player. He did not fail in the potentially adventuristic enterprise of joining the vision of “redemption” to “doomsday weapons”, but the intellectuals who now emerged into the daylight of the young civil society felt that they had lost their innocence.

From the death of god to the eclipse of the divine light “Nietzsche’s saying ‘God is dead: we have killed him’, is a sort of pathetic inscription at the bottom of the tombstone of the period”.96 With these words, Buber began his discussion of what he called “the eclipse of the divine light”. Two thinkers apart from Nietzsche in his opinion linked the death of God to the birth of modernity. Hegel’s statement in his essay Faith and Knowledge (1802) that “God himself is dead” reflected the problematic status of religion in the modern era, and this statement was also related to Pascal’s statement about the “lost God”. The statements of Nietzsche, Hegel and Pascal represent three different descriptions of the same problem. The origin of God and his future also preoccupied Bergson and Heidegger. Bergson’s starting-point that “this effort is from God, if it not from God in person” aroused Buber’s criticism: one cannot attach the name of God to an effort without fully investigating the meaning of the concept “God”. However, Buber believed that, unlike Bergson, Heidegger did not have in mind a new concept of God: He takes Nietzsche’s statement about the death of God and interprets it. There is no doubt that he interprets it correctly. He understands the saying “God has been killed” to mean that contemporary man has uprooted the idea of God from objective existence and placed it in “the immanence of subjectivity”.97 In the modern era, man places God in the subjective consciousness. Buber recognized the problematic nature of Heidegger’s assertion that “the killing signifies man’s rejection of the supersensory world as such”. In this sentence, Heidegger boasts of understanding the higher purposes, what is beyond the senses – God and the pagan deities. Buber feared that after the present nihilistic crisis, there would be a resurgence of the mythological-pagan world in religion and politics, in which the business of images would begin again – depictions of God, depictions of the gods, depictions of God and the gods – without man gaining experience or having real encounters with the God of “I  and Thou”; but without the reality of this encounter all the images are just playthings and hocus-pocus.98 Buber was repelled by Heidegger’s call for a return of the pagan gods. One cannot go back to the time of the gods, for then man revered the mythological deities as God himself. Unlike the modernist critics of religion from the Young Hegelians to Nietzsche, Buber thought that man is a homo religiosus for whom belief in a transcendental

140  The resurrection of myth reality is vital to his existence. To the same degree, he thought that Nietzsche’s interpretation of the modern world, which based itself on the ashes of God, was exact and correct. Institutional religion and modern thought seek to hide us from God. The person who in Buber’s opinion hid God most effectively was the atheistic existentialist Sartre, who expressed a total denial: Sartre takes hold of Nietzsche’s call, or rather his cry, “God is dead”, as an actual statement of fact. For him, this is the outstanding feature of our age – that it has destroyed God. He gives us his own interpretation, a very strange one: “He spoke to us, and now he is silent. Now we are only dealing with his corpse”.99 In former times, said Buber, men heard God’s voice, and now he is silent. This is God hiding his face, as in the biblical expression “God hid himself”.100 Sartre concluded that this transcendental silence was connected with modern man’s need still to cling to religion: “This is the most important problem, today as yesterday. This is the problem that preoccupied Nietzsche, Heidegger and Jaspers”. He believed that the purpose of existentialism was to reject the need for religion, to make man “forget” God, as the world is only the world of man. Sartre returned to Feuerbach’s basic premise that man is in charge of the world. If the father-God is rejected, it necessarily follows according to Sartre that someone else will set up values. Life has no a priori meaning: it is up to man to give it value and purpose. “That is almost exactly what Nietzsche said”,101 declared Buber, who refused to accept Sartre’s conclusions. The criticism of Sartre’s denial led Buber into a discussion of Heidegger and God, a discussion with surprising results: Like Sartre, Heidegger also begins with Nietzsche’s saying “God is dead”, a saying that has been widely interpreted. It is clear to him that Nietzsche wished to separate himself in this way not only from God but from the absolute in all its forms, and thus in reality not only from religion but also from metaphysics.102 Heidegger, said Buber, believed he could extract from this nihilistic age a newold ontological position which combined Parmenedes with Hegel. This new position of Heidegger’s was possible, despite the ‘death of God’, because for him the situation was connected to man’s fate. The acknowledgment that perhaps God would be resurrected of course differs from atheism of the Sartrean kind, and it is based on the idea that the modern era is the age of gods who have vanished and of the God who is about to appear. Of these two who adopted Nietzsche’s catch-phrase about the death of God, one of them, Sartre, took it and himself ad absurdum [. . .] and as for the other, Heidegger, his idea of the rebirth of God through true thought was bound up in the chains of time. It would seem that this existentialism lost its way.103

“It came over me like a revelation”  141 One may discern a certain closeness between Buber and Heidegger, who thought that “the gods are only able to speak when they turn towards us to say”.104 This statement is close to the Buberian dialogic principle of the affinity of God and man. The political reality of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century in Buber’s opinion uprooted the seeds sown by Heidegger in anticipation of God’s discourse, “and planted instead a belief in something completely new”. Buber’s attitude to Heidegger and the latter’s support for National Socialism remains unclear, and it is therefore not surprising that the words “Hitler” and “Nazism” are not mentioned by him in connection with Heidegger. But at the same time, Buber spoke of “the horrifying spirit of the historical events of those days”,105 hinting at Heidegger’s speech on receiving his rectorate in 1933, a speech in which he declared that [Hitler] was “today and in the future the reality of Germany and its law”.106 It was not only that Buber was disappointed by the fact that the events of those days prevented Heidegger’s vision – opening up the possibility of the return of God – from coming to pass, but that he wished to serve as a spokesman for Heidegger who had warned against the desire of the Übermensch to succeed God on earth: “With regard to Nietzsche’s catchword ‘all the gods are dead’, we now want the Übermensch to live!”,107 said Heidegger, adding the following warning in a tone that was unusual for him: “Man can never put himself in place of God because the essence of man never reaches the sphere of the essence of God [. . .]. The Übermensch is not and never will be in place of God”. After the Second World War, Buber recommended reading these words of Heidegger sympathetically: “These words force one to pay attention”.108 From philosopher to psychologist in one breath: from Heidegger, Buber went on to discuss Carl Gustav Jung and his connection with the status of the divinity.109 Jung thought that metaphysical assertions are expressions of the soul, and are therefore psychological assertions. The place of God is taken by the wholeness of man, who symbolizes the divine, called by Jung “selfhood”. Buber explained that “selfhood” was not a substitute for God, and he claimed that just as in the genealogy Nietzsche made in reconstructing the transcendental God, so Jung believed that man brings back to himself what he places on the entity beyond him without wishing to make himself into God: “Man does not deny the transcendental God, he only expels him from himself”.110 When Buber began to show an interest in the psychology of religion at the turn of the century, the idea of God “in process of formation” found a place in his thinking “as an image and a feeling”, as he described it. This concept had an interesting development in his case: “God in formation” led to “God realized in man”.111 These thoughts of Buber on the “realization” or “embodiment” of man in his writings before the First World War and in his book Daniel were very close in spirit to the Nietzschean Übermensch as a “redeemer” who brings about his human self-redemption. Buber’s conclusion that the Nietzschean Übermensch saw himself as a replacement for God was the result of a genealogical procedure, learned from Nietzsche, which revealed a mutual affinity between nihilism, the Übermensch, and the will to power. Buber showed Nietzsche’s critique of morality to be a modification of Marx’s criticism of ideologies: namely, that moral

142  The resurrection of myth teachings in history were an expression of the struggle between rulers and ruled.112 The moral teachings must be seen in the context of the way the teachings came to be formed, and the fixing of values bears a direct relationship to the power of the one who determines the values. Buber pointed out a number of contradictions in Nietzsche’s thinking. The first was the identification of “a morality of values” with morality as such, as if “a morality of masters” did not exist. The second was that Nietzsche wished to give morality a biological basis. In support of this assertion, Buber cites his declaration: “I teach saying ‘no’ to anything that weakens; I teach saying ‘yes’ to anything that strengthens”.113 It should be pointed out, however, that this sentence, quoted as a proof of Nietzsche’s biologism, has no connection with biology. Third, this was the period of the decline of the accepted Western morality, a nihilistic decline in which “the loftiest values were divested of their value”. Life no longer had a purpose, “a purpose beyond humanity and beyond the individual”. The Übermensch was supposed to be a new purpose, which once again gave a taste to life and conferred validity on new values, but these new values contradicted the principle of “eternal recurrence”, which Nietzsche called “the most extreme form of nihilism”. “With a thoroughness not found among many thinkers among our contemporaries who preceded him”, Nietzsche, said Buber, spotted the correlation between the values of morality and religious faith. He grasped the crucial significance of the time, in which “it was impossible to still believe in God and in an essential moral order”. His decisive saying was his cry, “God is dead!” But he could not accept this as an end, but only as a turning-point.114 Sometimes he tried to find a way out via some idea that would rescue God for those without God: If a new God would not arise within man, it was at any rate necessary that a God-replacement would arise within him in the form of the Übermensch. Perhaps this replacement would serve as a criterion for the new values, which affirms life. On this concept of the Übermensch was based the new biological scale of values in which the values of good and evil were exchanged for the values of strong and weak.115 The inner logic that destroyed the values of good and evil could be applied “even more ferociously” to the criteria of strong and weak. “Nietzsche sought to overcome nihilism, which he himself brought to fulfilment”, said Buber, “and here he collapsed”. Plato’s doctrine of ideas, continued Buber, was different from the Übermensch, which was not a doctrine. Unlike the scale of values created by the idea of the good, the criteria of strength and weakness did not form a scale of values at all.116 The modern situation in which nihilism seeks to save itself through self-overcoming was doomed to failure. In order to meet this challenge, Buber began to formulate his positive ideas, the philosophy of “I and Thou”. After he had traced the entire Nietzschean path down to “the death of God” and the nihilistic implications of this proclamation, Buber now stood at a critical juncture and opted for a new philosophical theology. Two

“It came over me like a revelation”  143 separate entities sought an encounter between them, and it took place between the “I” of man and the great “Thou” of God. Buber adopted the ontological basic premise of religious faith: faith comes from an encounter with something outside oneself which gives us the deepest insights and shows us the meaning of human existence. Buber was not content, as Nietzsche was, with rejecting the alienating principles of religion but wished to reveal to modern man the dialogic presence of religious faith.117

The problem of man In a lecture he gave at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1938, Buber acknowledged Nietzsche’s revolutionary quality. Long before existentialism and postmodernism, Nietzsche cast doubt on the validity of the individual, describing him as a problem, as an entity that was not self-evident, as a “thing” that could be produced, the result of conditioning. The philosophical importance of Nietzsche, in his opinion, lay in the fact “that he made man the center of his thinking about the universe to an extent that no thinker had done before”.118 It was this subjective radicalism that gave his philosophical anthropology an unequaled power and vigor. The starting-point of Buber’s discussion in his article “Feuerbach and Nietzsche” was Feuerbach’s revolt against Hegel which placed the emphasis on man as against a philosophical system. Unlike Kant, Feuerbach did not focus on human knowledge but on man as the one universal subject of philosophy. Nietzsche went beyond Feuerbach in placing the experience of human existence at the center. Apart from the idea that man should be the focus of philosophical inquiry, said Buber, “the problematic nature of man was Nietzsche’s great subject and interest”. Buber himself adopted Nietzsche’s genealogical methodology and traced the development of Nietzsche’s treatment of the subject of the construction of the individual. In 1874, Nietzsche asked in his essay Schopenhauer as an Educator, “What is man?”, and he answered, “he is something closed up and sealed”. In 1884, he offered an explanation of this: man’s form is not yet complete. He is an entity in formation, “a creature whose nature has not yet been determined”, and at the same time one can say that he is “the great mistake in nature and something that is contradictory to it”. In the years 1883–1888 when he wrote The Will to Power, Nietzsche claimed that man was something that had to be created, “He is the embryo of the future man, as it were [. . .]. Man is something fluid and frail that can easily be given a form, any form”.119 The aim of Christianity’s ascetic ideal, said Buber speaking of Nietzsche, was to liberate man from being a creature without a purpose and without significance. Unlike ascetic Christianity, which cut man off from the basis of life, Nietzsche maintained that life itself was the purpose and not some object beyond existence. Life is the source of power and of the will to liberate it (Buber preferred this expression to the will to power). Every great civilization grew out of the will to power, and the ascetic ideals that educated man in accordance with a morality of wastage oppressed the urge to live. The new man who will be born will be liberated from the prohibiting conscience. The human race is not an end but a means,

144  The resurrection of myth a bridge, “a great promise”. Man is a creature that promises, or, in other words, he is the servant of the future. According to Nietzsche, this characteristic of promising originated in the need for a contract between debtor and creditor. The source of the moral concept “duty” is the material concept “debt”. Society educates man to norms of “duty” and “debt”, and utilizes all means, including ascetic ideals, to oppress the individual, his activities, his uniqueness. Man has to be liberated from these restraints, from both the sickness and the cure, from the evil of the morality of wastage and from the Christian redemption. Buber criticized Nietzsche’s positive philosophy: “In Nietzsche’s system, everything offered as a solution is false”.120 In his attempt to refute Nietzsche’s sociological and genealogical analysis of morals, Buber claimed that the concept of duty is already found in a developed form in the most primitive societies where the idea of debtors and creditors is practically unknown. For example, a man can be found guilty of transgressing one of the laws of inheritance prevailing in his society and which are generally ascribed a divine origin, or a youth has to swear loyalty on being received into his tribe. Nietzsche’s psychological and historical explanation of the will to power did not satisfy Buber either. Nietzsche once described it as the will to add power to power, and on another occasion, he defined it as “an insatiable desire to display authority, or the use and exercise of authority”.121 These are two different explanations. The will to power, said Buber, is not integral to greatness. A great man does not desire authority, for in the end it is only a means to attain an objective. Power is functional and not immanent to greatness. A great man who seeks power is arrogant, and he resembles those lacking in strength who try by all means to gain authority. The intensification of the will to power was connected with a methodical direction: it did not concern man alone but was a universal existential phenomenon, and man was the personification of the will to power. Nietzsche’s description of the will to power as both a universal phenomenon and an individual phenomenon was an early formulation of Existentialism. Why did Nietzsche specially want to emphasize the will? The reason was that the will existed, not only in order to preserve existence, but also in order to strengthen it. The will to power was the ultimate basis, the first cause of all existence, the meaning of all things: “All significance is will to power”. The whole of existence was based on “one elementary basic fact”: the will to power. The will to power eliminated things-in-themselves and turned beliefs, knowledges, and truths into reflections of the will to power. Facts did not exist, but only interpretations of facts. The denial of all projections led to the existential root of the universe, to an existence free of interpretations, of redundant layers. The Nietzschean will to power was a cosmic principle as well as a subjective and psychological principle. In other words, the will to power as a cosmic principle guided all individuals, each of whom separately constitutes an authentic or perverted will to power. The cosmic element – the will to power – and the historical element – man – coalesced into a single whole: man was rooted in the universe. Man therefore had to affirm the universe, to say “yes” to eternal recurrence, by means of an authentic will to power. The sphere of the universe and the sphere of man were one and the same.

“It came over me like a revelation”  145 This was the basis for the later Existentialism, which identified existence with the self. The differences of approach of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer led to a difference in their attitude to history: in Nietzsche, one finds a maximalization of the will to power despite historical recurrence, while the Schopenhauerian passivity led to a minimalization of the will to power. Existence had not only to be accepted, but also intensified.122 The will did not perform any actions and had no intentions, but was a blind Dionysian force, a phenomenon without a purpose: something irrational, without a consciousness (WM 550). Unlike Schopenhauer, who wanted the will to be denied, Nietzsche wished it to be intensified (WM 692). In the conditions of the universe, everything that existed was an obstacle and a stumbling-block for everything else, with the result that there was no harmony. The basis of power was really the disharmonious nature of the universe. Nietzsche placed the emphasis on existence itself and not on relationships. In this Heraclitean situation, all beings sought power, tried to expand, and came into conflict with other beings. The principle of adaptation for survival gave way to the Nietzschean principle of the will to power.123 The Nietzschean revolution was that of abandoning the idea of a purpose in favor of the idea of a process for its own sake.124 The main thing, the thing which brought satisfaction, was the pursuit of power, but the achievement of one’s goal was hollow and unsatisfying. Satisfaction and dissatisfaction were “ontologized”. Nietzsche wanted to detach modern man from social norms and to adapt him to the rhythm of his private world, which he had created. Ethics was no longer a matter between man and his fellow man, but between man and the cosmos. Thus, the will to power could be understood as a search for authenticity: that is, as a desire to find a correlation between man and the rhythm of his world. Buber used the Nietzschean theory of the will to power to explain that one cannot understand the problem of man or redeem him if one assumes that the individual is the personification of the will to power. One should remember that, unlike Nietzsche’s, Buber’s understanding of anthropology was based on the recognition of the affinity between man and his fellow man. A  genuine man, said Buber, expressing his outlook, is a social man, a man who practices the affinity of I and Thou. Nietzsche, he thought, was not right in his anthropological outlook, but the fact that he discussed the question gave philosophical priority to the subject. In Buber’s opinion, Nietzsche differed from thinkers like Augustine, Pascal, and Kant who thought that man was not a kind of animal but constituted a special category. Nietzsche, “the mystic of the Enlightenment”, as Buber called him, did not acknowledge this. He saw man only from an evolutionary perspective as a sort of animal who had raised himself and left the animal world [. . .].125 Man is no longer seen as the product of the spirit – we have put him back among the animals. From this anthropological discussion it appears that man is separate from the animal world and has renounced its ways, but has nevertheless remained “a kind of overgrown animal”.

146  The resurrection of myth In his recognition of the danger of Nietzsche’s anthropological ideas that led to nihilism, Buber saw that the problem of man was the problem of a creature that in the depths of nature reached its extremity, the dangerous end of natural existence, the place where there begins, not the sphere of the spirit as Kant believed, but the vertiginous depths of nothingness.126 Nietzsche did not see man as something in itself, a “new creature”, but only as something in process of formation, “an experiment, a groping, an attempt, in fact not a full creature but at the most a kind of embryo of a creature, an animal who had not yet become part of nature”. This creature was faced with two possibilities: either to become a “herd animal” through “ever-encroaching morality”, in which case he would be a degenerate animal, or else he could overcome and renew his instincts, could build his life on the basis of the will to power and finally be the true man, a new creature that had succeeded. Here Buber asked a difficult question: because Nietzsche wanted at all costs to see man in the context of the animal world, the question arises: how can one explain the fact that a creature like man evolved and left that world?127 Nietzsche in Buber’s opinion failed to answer this question because he ignored the fact that in the universe there is only one creature that has a consciousness and is capable of reflection and the power of criticism. If Nietzsche had thought in this way he would have arrived at sociology, a discipline he disdained because in Buber’s view he rejected the social man. Just as the slave morality, as the perverted will to power of the weak, characterized a decadent culture, so the aristocratic morality, as the authentic will to power of the strong, creates a healthy culture. Nietzsche’s point of view made it clear that he, the genealogist of culture, wished to remain within the area of discourse of Western culture, and he did not intend an obliteration of that culture, and a return to the chaotic condition of nature. His aim was to restore nature to culture, and by that means to pass from a decadent culture to an authentic one. The revolution that Nietzsche wanted to carry out was within the culture and not against it. The elements of construction and destruction were to be found within the culture itself, and the processes of sickness and recuperation, decadence, and alienation were like the signs of an inner struggle. In this respect, the transvaluation of values was the fuel driving history. The war between good and evil did not only take place in the historic battle between Judah and Rome, but also in the Renaissance and Reformation, during the French Revolution and under Napoleon (GM 16). Historical events were examined from the point of view of the struggle between “good” and “evil”: the collective illusion of Western culture, according to Nietzsche, was its Messianic faith in the victory of the “good” over the “evil” and in historical progress. History, for Nietzsche, was beyond good and evil: in the cosmic dimension, he had an immanent concept of being, and, in the human dimension, he denied the existence of moral or rational progress in the history of mankind. History was a dialectics, but not a progress: being was everything, and

“It came over me like a revelation”  147 it left no room for moral or rational interpretation. The interpretation of events in terms of values was thrust aside by Nietzsche to make way for the immanent explanation of the cosmos by means of the will to power. Buber insisted on the revolutionary significance of the transvaluation of the values of Western culture in the first third of the twentieth century as a historical witness and philosophical observer of the rise of Fascism.

Face-to-face with Fascism Like Ernst Cassirer, who only towards the end of his life was critical towards myth, Buber, at the height of the Second World War, became alarmed when he perceived the disastrous consequences of the Nietzsche-inspired myth of the Übermensch – a myth adopted in a totally irrational manner by the National Socialist political theology. Cassirer investigated myth twice in his life, in his youth, and in his maturity. In 1925, when his work Mythical Thought, the second part of his trilogy The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms was published, he made no attempt to criticize the Völkisch mythical thought which was then beginning to be current.128 The early Cassirer was unable to distinguish between the philosophical and anthropological examination of myths and the mythologization of the Volk. Believing in German liberalism, he was careful in the 1920s not to go beyond the confines of the academic ivory tower even when he appeared in political gatherings.129 But gradually, he felt the approaching storm threatening to shatter the flimsy structure of the young German democracy. In his famous debate with Martin Heidegger, one sees that he perceived that the symbol had ceased to become an allegory and had become real. It was only a matter of time before pagan idolatry would become a political reality.130 In the same way, Buber, in his article “The People and Leader”, published in 1942, a decisive year both for the totalitarian leadership in Europe and for the Jewish people in its darkest hour, scrutinized the character of the Fascist and Nazi leaders. In Mussolini, he saw the self-consciousness of a particular kind of leader, a sort of “man who became God”.131 He had the same perception of Hitler: “ ‘Man has become God’, he says, that is its plain meaning – that is to say, it is the meaning of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Man is God in process of formation”. This is not the traditional model of a leader, but a modern form of leadership based on political theology. Nietzsche gave the inspiration for the union of political leadership and the desire to be God: In Nietzsche, we find the following: “Plato said, ‘Each of us wants to rule over everyone else as far as possible, and on a higher level to be God’. This desire must be regained”. In the statement just given, which was not made by Plato, the person who spoke these words – quoted with extraordinary inaccuracy by a philologist like Nietzsche  – was a young man brought by his father to Socrates to be his pupil. The sage did not contradict this arrogant assertion, but instructed the boy by giving him examples of noble and exalted men such as Themistocles and Pericles, none of whom wished to rule over all

148  The resurrection of myth human beings, let alone be God. Nietzsche, who was not a great thinker, nor a great poet, but an aphorist of genius, had no idea that his concept of “God in process of formation” would be appropriated not by the type of person he called the “superman” but by a base type of man who had broken free from all restraints, but who nevertheless deep down was troubled by self-doubts, and therefore had to find worshippers to bolster his faith in himself.132 In addition to his late non-admiration for Nietzsche, whom, as we have seen, he regarded as “not a great thinker, nor a great poet”, the mature Buber perceived in the philosopher “an intention of rearing a ruling caste  – the future lords of the earth”.133 Nietzsche, added Buber, showed a lack of responsibility in granting legitimacy to unscrupulous leaders who stir up the masses in times of crisis. He wanted to restore the ‘good conscience’ of the strong man, the man of ardor, but it never occurred to him that in fact he was strengthening the lack of conscience of a man defective from birth. This was a terrible type of man, like those who in primitive societies are known as sorcerers.134 A case-in-point was Mussolini. The Italian leader, wrote Buber, described revolution as “an intense desire to seize power”. Mussolini formulated his ideology as follows: “Our programme is simple: we seek to govern Italy”.135 Here Buber at an early stage identified the political make-up of Fascism, which he called a “Sorelian myth”  – a political myth which drew its inspiration from Georges Sorel among others, and which combined the will to power, the affirmation of the reality of conflict, the creation of a “new man”, and continual rousing of the masses. This political myth was the source of energy of the masses. At the beginning of his political career, Mussolini was guided by syndicalist principles, but he soon abandoned his socialist outlook, which he called “Socialism à la Sorel”, and exchanged it for what Buber called “leadership without substance” which glorified the nation: “We have created our own myth. Our myth is the nation”.136 According to Buber, this declaration was not intended to concretize the mythical greatness of the nation, but “in reality to give the fascist regime a permanent hold”. Mussolini knew the soul of the masses: they were indifferent to truth, and the frequent wars had made them skeptical about any truths: “A  spur, a hope, faith and courage”, said Mussolini. “Do the masses believe in truth?”137 Political aesthetics gave the masses illusions of greatness and creativity, courage and larger-than-life actions. Between the Fascist aesthetic of power and the traditional conception of culture there was a chasm that was hard to bridge. Already in his article “Feuerbach and Nietzsche”, which he wrote four years before “The People and Leader”, Buber, speaking of the relationship between power and culture, reached the conclusion that a leader who serves his people enriches the national culture, but one who seeks power as his sole objective weakens and paralyzes it. Sometimes political strength and cultural strength are combined. Jakob Burckhardt, “whom Nietzsche

“It came over me like a revelation”  149 admired more than any other person of his generation but who increasingly took his distance from him”,138 declared that only occasionally are political power and a strong culture found together. According to Buber, Burckhardt’s famous thesis that the will to power is the motive-force of the great men in history served as a source of inspiration for Nietzsche when he formulated his perception of the will to power, although Burckhardt meant something different from the will to power as such. He insisted that the proof that Burckhardt had a different intention from Nietzsche was that in a lecture Burckhardt claimed that “authority is bad in itself, whoever exerts it”, because it is a lust that can never be satisfied. It is an immanent authority that feeds upon itself without responsibility, that depends purely on itself – an arbitrary authority.139 Making a distinction between the Fascist will to power and the Bolshevik one, Buber said that the “red” totalitarianism was based on an ideology, or at least had a vital relationship to the ideology, whereas the “brown” totalitarianism was only “a fervent desire to hold power”. Bolshevism is in some way connected to an idea while Fascism is totally opportunistic.140 The difference between Lenin and Mussolini was that between a great historical figure and an imitation. Mussolini, who wanted to rule, at the age of 27, praised Max Stirner’s book, The Ego and Its Own, “the gospel of individualism and the greatest poem ever written to the glory of man who has become God”.141 The role of dictator allows one to play God on earth. In contrast to the cynicism and pretense of Mussolini, Hitler, in his conversations with Hermann Rauschning, expressed his positions honestly. According to Buber, Hermann Rauschning, President of the Danzig Senate, and writer of the best-seller Voice of Destruction, found that the Führer showed a tendency to make nihilistic observations.142 In his early book The Revolution of Nihilism (1939), Rauschning examined National Socialism as a dynamist philosophy without a doctrine. Nazism, in his view, is absolute liberation from the past, action for its own sake, a process of destruction which must develop, according to its own internal logic, into totalitarian tyranny.143 Buber quoted sayings of Hitler which stressed the nihilistic nature of his revolution: “There is no fixed objective. There is no absolute truth either in the moral sense or in the scientific sense”.144 Buber interpreted this to mean there is no truth except in a political sense. The meaning of “truth” here is what a man at a given time wants the masses to think is truth. The leader’s principle is this: one cannot believe in anything except one’s own rule. Buber saw a parallel to Hitler in the false Messiah Jacob Frank. He quoted the words of this eighteenth-century nihilist: “I came to destroy all laws and teachings and I wanted to bring life to the world [. . .] You must get rid of all laws and teachings and follow me step by step”.145 Buber used the example of Frank to demonstrate the character of Hitler’s leadership: “I say to you”, Frank told his disciples, “that all leaders have to be people of unbelief”.146 This means that a leader can only believe in himself, in the imperative: Jacob Frank and Adolf Hitler are outstanding examples of people without restraints and seemingly without spiritual reflection. I say “seemingly”, for it is likely that both of them felt what the reality was when in the middle of the

150  The resurrection of myth night their naked countenance appeared in front of them and looked back at them, but this is a secret an outsider cannot penetrate.147 Nihilism and the will to power go together, and as Buber said, “to want power and authority for the sake of power and authority is to want nothing”.148 In other words, “the desire for power for power’s sake leads to arrogance in individuals and the suicide of nations”. Technology played a central role in the totalitarianisms of the Soviet Union and Germany, and some people have considered it the modern will to power. Martin Heidegger, for example, looked at technology not as the will to power but as the will to will. Because technology does not serve any purpose apart from itself it has been seen as a nihilistic will to power. As Buber said, “In our time, which is a time in which machines have risen up and overcome human beings and seem to use them, people have made great changes and their products have become bigger than they are”.149 Another characteristic of modern dictatorship is hubris: “There have been periods when countries have been inundated by barbarian peoples, but they did not say, like Hitler, ‘Yes, we are barbarians! We want to be barbarians!’ ”150 Buber went a stage further than Max Weber and described a “negative charisma” as “a desire for power and authority for the sake of power and authority”. This is not a functional charisma by means of which a leader implements his ideas and puts his program into practice, but a nihilistic charisma – a charisma for charisma’s sake. As proof, he took the example of Mussolini, who in 1920 said, “My starting-point is the individual, and I aim my weapon against the state [. . .] the state in all its forms, the state yesterday and tomorrow!”151 As soon as he came to power, however, he declared himself willing to consider the individual “as long as he conforms to the state”. For Hitler, too, the leader and the ideology were one and the same. Buber added ironically, “The leader alone knows the objective, but there is no objective. The leader embodies the idea, but there is no idea”.152 Buber warned that the Nietzschean Übermensch had an affinity with this kind of political nihilism: The Übermensch is a person whom no inner restraint prevents from declaring “I’m the Übermensch!” And indeed, Nietzsche’s sister welcomed Hitler as the realization of her brother’s dream of the Übermensch. Our period is characterized by the imaginary realization of great dreams.153 A central point of Buber’s critique of Nietzsche was the latter’s radical rejection of the Judeo-Christian morality, with its negative consequences. Hermann Goering, Hitler’s deputy, said, “I  have no conscience. My conscience is Adolf Hitler”.154 The commands of the Führer fill the empty space: the individual is relieved of self-improvement and responsibility because he has a “leader”. With the words “I have no conscience”, the individual divests himself of his maturity and denies his humanity. The conclusion to be drawn, however, is not that Hitler is everyone’s conscience, for Hitler said, “Conscience is a Jewish invention”. The person who in Buber’s opinion preceded Hitler in rejecting the Judeo-Christian

“It came over me like a revelation”  151 morality was of course Nietzsche. Conscience was regarded as a blemish in man’s nature. Buber described this as a process suffused with quasi-religious pathos: “It was a kind of destruction of ‘Jewish’ Christianity by anti-Christianity, a destruction of Christian messianism by anti-messianism”.155 Instead of a divine redeemer there appeared the new leader who relieved his followers of the burden of responsibility. The transvaluation of values induced Hitler to release man from his conscience, to lead the nihilistic revolution for the destruction of Jewish messianism and its messengers. It is not only through these subjects of Jewish Messianism and the renewal of myth that Gershom Scholem is related to Buber but also through their attraction as young Jews to Nietzsche’s radical thinking. The young Scholem envisioned Buber as a prophet and himself as the Messiah. Their self-perception, their creative impulse and their theological outlook owed much to the “heretical religiosity” of the Nietzschean school of thought which inspired them at a crucial stage of their development.

Notes 1 Gilya Gerda Schmidt, Martin Buber’s Formative Years, Tuscaloosa 1995; Lawrence J. Silberstein, Martin Buber’s Social and Religious Thought, Alienation and the Quest for Meaning, New York 1989. 2 Martin Buber, “Das Gebet”, Die Welt 5, 10 (8 March 1901); 13 [Yiddish]. 3 Buber, “Von jüdischer Kunst”, Jüdische Bewegung, first series, 1900–1914 (Berlin, 1916 b). [German]. 4 Akiva Ernst Simon, Targets, Crossroads, Ways: The Thought of Martin Buber, Tel Aviv 1985, 168. [Hebrew]. 5 Buber, Encounter: Autobiographical Fragments, trans. Maurice Friedman, La Salle, IL. 1967, 44. 6 D. Wood, “Nietzsche’s Transvaluation of Time”, in D.F. Krell and D. Wood, eds., Exceedingly Nietzsche – Aspects of Contemporary Nietzsche Interpretation, London 1988, 31–62. 7 Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Berkeley 1987, 30. 8 Buber, “Zarathustra”, handwritten manuscript (1898–1900) (Jerusalem, National Library, Buber Archives, Ms. Var. 350 B/7b), unpaginated. Trans. Schmidt, Martin Buber; Formative Years. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ohana, “The Myth of Zarathustra: Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and the Nationalisation of Jewish Myth”, in Modernism and Zionism, New York 2012, 29–80. 12 Buber, “Zarathustra”. 13 Schmidt, Martin Buber’s Formative Years, 28. 14 Buber, “Ein Wort über Nietzsche und die Lebenswerte”, Die Kunst im Leben, I, 13 (December 1900) [German]. Courtesy of Margot Cohen, Buber Archives, trans. G.G. Schmidt. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 13. 17 Jacob Golomb, “Martin Buber’s ‘Liberation’ from Nietzsche’s ‘Invasion’ ”, Nietzsche and Zion, Ithaca 2004, 159–188. 18 Buber, “Ein Wort über Nietzsche”.

152  The resurrection of myth 19 Ohana, “The Role of Myth in History: Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Sorel”. 20 Gershom Scholem, Additional Thing, Tel Aviv 1989, 389. [Hebrew]. 21 Buber, “Jewish Myth”, Documentation and Assignment, Jerusalem 1960, 80–88. [Hebrew]. 22 Lawrence J. Silberstein, Martin Buber’s Social and Religious Thought: Alienation and the Quest for Meaning, New York 1989, 52. 23 Grete Schaeder, The Hebrew Humanism of Buber, trans. Noah Jacobs, Detroit 1973, 91–106. 24 S. Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics, Cambridge 1986; K.J. Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche’s Overcoming of Kant and Metaphysics – From Tragedy to Nihilism”, Nietzsche Studien 16 (1987): 310–399. 25 Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, Religion and Other Essays, Boston 1948. 26 Yonina Gerber-Talmon, “The Concept of Time in Primitive Myths”, Iyyun 2, 4 (October 1951): 201–214. [Hebrew]. 27 Buber, “Jewish Myth”, 80. 28 Ignac Goldziher, Le culte des ancêtres et des morts chez les Arabes, Paris 1885. 29 Buber, “Jewish Myth”, 81. 30 See, for example: Moshe Idel, “As Far as East Is from West: Rabbis and Cabbalists in Gershom Scholem’s Phenomenological Perception of Judaism”, in Ohana and Wistrich, eds., Myth and Memory, London 1995, 73–87 [Hebrew]; Ehud Luz, “The Historicalcollective Memory in the Works of Martin Buber”, in Haviva Pedaya, ed., Myth in Judaism, Jerusalem 1996, 366–379 [Hebrew]; Zeev Levy, “On Myth in the Outlook of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig”, Meir Ayali and others, eds., Tura, Tel Aviv 1989, 308–310. [Hebrew]. 31 Yehezkel Kaufmann, “There Is No Myth in Israel”, in History of the Faith of Israel from the Earliest Times to the End of the Second Temple, Tel Aviv 1942, 419–425. [Hebrew]. 32 Ohana, “Yeshayahu Leibowitz: The Radical Intellectual and the Critic of the ‘Canaanite Messianism’ ”, in Eliezer Ravitzky, ed., Yeshayahu Leibowitz Between Conservatism and Radicalism – Reflections on His Philosophy, Tel Aviv 2007, 155–177. [Hebrew]. 33 B.A.V. Groningen, In the Grip of the Past, Leiden 1953. 34 J. Burry, A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander, London 1970. 35 Buber, Moses – The Revolution and the Covenant, Oxford 1946. 36 Daniel S. Breslauer, Martin Buber on Myth: An Introduction, New York 1990, 194–227. 37 Thomas Mann, Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events, Washington, DC 1947. 38 Hans Kohn, Martin Buber. Sein Werk und seine Zeit, Cologne 1961, 295; Buber, “Die Schaffenden, das Volk und die Bewegung  – Einige Bemerkungen”, Jüdische Almanach, Berlin 1902, 19–24. See also, Silberstein, Martin Buber’s Social and Religious Thought, 33. 39 Mendes-Flohr, “Zarathustra’s Apostle”, 239. 40 Jehuda Reinharz, “Achad Ha’am und der deutsche Zionismus”, Bulletin des Leo Baeck 61 (1982): 4–27. 41 Buber, “Zionistische Politik”, (1903) in Jüdische Bewegung: Gesammelte Aufsätze und Ansprachen, 1900–1914, Berlin 1916., first series, 113 ff. 42 Buber, “Renaissance und Bewegung”, (1903), in Jüdische Bewegung. 43 On Buber’s affinity to Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s influence on Buber, see Paul MendesFlohr, “Zarathustra’s Apostle: Martin Buber and the Jewish Renaissance”, in Jacob Golomb, ed., Nietzsche and Jewish Culture, London 1997, 9–17. 44 Buber 1950, 38. 45 Simon, Targets, Crossroads, Ways, 33. 46 Simon, “Buber or Ben-Gurion?” New Outlook 9, (1966): 9–17. 47 Buber, “The Messianic Mystery”, trans. T. Dreyfus, Da’at 5 (1980): 117–133. [Hebrew]; Ohana, “Ambiguous Messianism: The Political Theology of Martin Buber”, Religion Compass 5, 1 (January 2011): 50–60.

“It came over me like a revelation”  153 48 Buber, People and Universe, Jerusalem 1961, 243–244. 49 Buber, Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung, Berlin 1936. [German]; idem., The Way of the Ancient Script: Reviews in the Style Patterns of the Bible, Jerusalem 1964, Introduction. [Hebrew]. 50 Buber, Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung, 8. 51 Ohana, “J.L. Talmon, Gershom Scholem and the Price of Messianism”, History of European Ideas 34, 2 (2008): 169–188. 52 Buber, Haaretz, 8 December 1944. [Hebrew]; Abraham Shapira, “Political Messianism and Its Place in Martin Buber’s Perception of Redemption”, Lectures in Remembrance of Martin Buber, Jerusalem 1987, 76–82. [Hebrew]. 53 Buber, Olelot, Jerusalem 1966. [Hebrew]. 54 Buber, The Way of the Ancient Script, 115–116. 55 Ohana, Humanist in the Sun: Albert Camus and the Mediterranean Inspiration, Jerusalem 2000, 99. [Hebrew]. 56 Shalom Ratzabi, “The Jewish State in Buber’s Political Thinking, 1942–1965”, in Anita Shapira, ed., Independence: Fifty Years, Jerusalem 1998, 202. [Hebrew]. 57 Buber, Between the Nation and Its Land, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Tel Aviv 1985, 177. [Hebrew]. 58 Ibid., 166–172. 59 Shalom Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism: The Radical Circle in Brit Shalom, 1925–1935, Leiden 2002. 60 Buber, People and Universe, 163–174. 61 Simon, Targets, Crossroads, Ways, 167. 62 Buber, “Jewish Myth”, 87. 63 Ibid., 85. 64 Ibid., 86. 65 Ohana, Homo Mythicus, Brighton 2010. 66 Buber, “The People and Leader, (1942)”, People and Universe, 63. 67 Gerber-Talmon, “The Concept of Time in the Primitive Myth”. 68 Ibid., 179. 69 Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. T.G. Bergin and M.H. Fisch, Ithaca 1986; Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, New York 1968; Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, II: Mythical Thought, New Haven 1955. 70 Saul Friedlander, “The Presence of Myths: Dialogue with Claude Lévy-Strauss”, Zmanim 17 (winter 1985). [Hebrew]. 71 Buber, “The People and Leader”, 63. 72 E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 Vol, New Haven 1953–1957. 73 Binyamin Oppenheimer, “Buber and Biblical Research”, in Yochanan Bloch, Chaim Gordon and Menahem Doron, eds., Martin Buber: A Hundred Years After His Birth, Tel Aviv 1982, 157–196. [Hebrew]. 74 Ron Margolin, “Jewish Myth in the Twentieth Century – Between Research and Philosophy”, in Beersheva, ed., The Book of Rivka, Haviva Pedaya and Ephraim Meir, 2007, 225–276. [Hebrew]. 75 Buber, “Pictures of Good and Evil”, in The Face of Man – Inquiries in Philosophical Anthropology, Jerusalem 1962, 325–376. [Hebrew]. 76 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, Boston 1969. 77 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, New York 1954. 78 Buber, “Jewish Myth”, 87. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., 88. 81 Theodore Reik, The Shofar, Tel Aviv 2005. [Hebrew]. 82 Sigmund Freud, “Totam and Taboo”, in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIII, London 1971, 1–99. 83 Claude Lévy Strauss, Structural Anthropology, New York 1963.

154  The resurrection of myth 84 Buber, Moses. 85 Grete Schaeder, “Portrait of Martin Buber Through His Correspondence”, in Mordechai Martin Buber, Correspondence, I, Jerusalem 1990, 9. [Hebrew]. 86 Among the important works on political theology, see Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, Princeton 1957; Jacob Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus, München 1993; Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. D. Wills, Chicago 1995; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford 1998; idem., The State of Exception, trans. K. Atell, Chicago 2005. 87 Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures, trans. F.G. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA 1987; Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Cambridge, MA 1983. 88 Uriel Tal, “Hermeneutical Aspects of Social Theology According to Jewish Sources”, Sidic 12 (1979): 39. 89 Ohana, “The Myth of Prometheus: Zionism and the Modernisation of Messianism”, Modernism and Zionism, 80–121. 90 Ohana, Political Theologies in the Holy Land: Israeli Messianism and Its Critics, London 2009. 91 Avi Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism, Chicago 1996; Binyamin Ish Shalom, Rav Avraham Itzhak Hacohen Kook: Between Rationalism and Mysticism, New York 1993. 92 Ohana, “Secular Messianism as Political Theology: The Case of David Ben-Gurion”, in Cristoph Schmidt and Eli Shenfeld, eds., Jewish Modernity and Political Theology, Tel Aviv 2008, 204–225. [Hebrew]. 93 “The Prime Minister’s Meeting with the Writers (1949)”, in Ohana Messianism and Mamlachtiut, 73–74. [Hebrew]. 94 Ibid. 95 Buber, “Hebrew Messianism”. 96 Buber, “The Eclipse of the Divine Light”, The Face of Man, 234. [Hebrew]. 97 Ibid., 235. 98 Ibid., 236. 99 Buber, “Modern Religion and Thought”, The Face of Man, 269. 100 Ibid., 270. 101 Ibid., 273. 102 Ibid., 274. 103 Ibid., 280. 104 Ibid., 279. 105 Ibid., 280. 106 Richard Wolin, ed. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, New York 1991. 107 Buber, “Religion and Modern Thought”, 294. 108 Ibid. 109 Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, Princeton 1995. 110 Ibid., 289. 111 Grete Schaeder, The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber, 35. 112 Buber, “Religion and Morals”, The Face of Man, 308. 113 Ibid., 309. 114 Ibid., 309–310. 115 Ibid., 310. 116 Ibid. 117 Buber, “I and Thou”, in The Secret of Discourse – On Man and His Situation in the Face of Existence, Jerusalem 1973, 3–108. [Hebrew]. 118 Buber, “Feuerbach and Nietzsche”, The Face of Man, 43. 119 Ibid., 44. Michel Foucault discussed this matter and elaborated in it. See Ohana, The Promethean Passion, 325–344.

“It came over me like a revelation”  155 120 Buber, “Feuerbach and Nietzsche”, 45. 121 Ibid., 46. 122 W. Stegmaier, “Darwin, Darwinismus, Nietzsche  – Zum Problem der Evolution”, Nietzsche-Studien 16 (1987): 264–287. 123 W. Stambaugh, The Problem of Time in Nietzsche, trans. T.E. Humphrey, London 1987. 124 W. Mittleman, “Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth in Nietzsche”, International Studies in Philosophy 16 (1984): 2–26. 125 Buber, “Feuerbach and Nietzsche”, 50. 126 Ibid., 51. 127 Ibid., 52. 128 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, II, trans. R. Mannheim, New Haven 1925. 129 I. Strenski, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History, Iowa 1987, 13–41. 130 Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State, New Haven 1946. 131 Buber, “The People and Leader”, 73. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid., 74. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid., 62. 136 Ibid., 63. 137 Ibid., 64. 138 Buber, “Feuerbach and Nietzsche”, 48. 139 Ibid., 49. 140 Buber, “The People and Leader”, 65. 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid., 66. 143 Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism, New York 1939, 12, 13, 23, 56. 144 Buber, “The People and Leader”, 69. 145 Rachel Elior, “Jacob Frank and His Book The Sayings of the Lord”, 471–548. 146 Buber, “The People and Leader”, 70. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid., 71. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid., 72. 151 Ibid. 152 Ibid., 73. 153 Ibid. 154 Ibid., 67. 155 Ibid.

6 Zarathustra or Messiah?

The Jewish Zarathustra? Echoes of the aesthetic revolution created by Nietzsche reached the German-­ Jewish youth, Gerhardt Scholem, who, between chapters of the Bible and portions of the Talmud that he studied under the guidance of the orthodox rabbi Isaac Bleichrode, also hungrily devoured the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Hugo Hofmannsthal, Stefan George, and, needless to say, Nietzsche. In one of the early entries in his diary, in November  1914, Scholem identified aestheticism with Nietzsche: Aestheticism! Oh this word, an abyss on whose opposite side is nothingness. Aestheticism, by which of course is meant self-conscious aestheticism, is the dying man’s last shivers and final attempt at life.1 Before Nietzsche, the aesthetic education of mankind envisaged by the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement had been closely connected with moral and rational improvement.2 Kant, in his Critique of Judgement (1790), expressed the view that aesthetic judgment of a universal character represented beauty as a moral good; Schiller, in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), gave greater importance to aesthetic than to ethical appreciation, but as a pupil of Kant, he preferred speculative reason; Schelling, in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), taught that the supremely rational act was an aesthetic one in which truth and goodness were fused with beauty. Schelling claimed that mythology, reason, and ethics were identical, so that intellectual observation could be regarded as an aesthetic observation.3 Nietzsche, on the other hand, as I have mentioned, was the first thinker after the Enlightenment to sever any possible connection between morals and aesthetics. While Schelling saw art as the only sphere which reflected reality, Nietzsche regarded art as a total illusion which, therefore, unlike reason, was unable to make the false claim of depicting reality. Scholem, for his part, declared that a natural people is in its essence an aesthetic entity, but that a decadent people loses its natural aestheticism, and “as a result – as with everything one lacks  – it’s become a science, the science of aesthetics (or just look at the ‘Science of Judaism’!!)”.4 Here one can discern a very early

Zarathustra or Messiah?  157 criticism by Scholem of Jüdische Wissenschaft (the Science of Judaism). “Sometimes it is tragic”, he writes, “when someone ardently desires life only to arrive at aesthetics. Hofmannsthal, Nietzsche, George. It’s a disaster, also called a Kismet. God save us from aesthetics!”5 As we know, the poet Stefan George at an early stage adopted Nietzsche as a philosopher-aesthetician who, as such, was able to bridge the gap between himself and Goethe.6 A month later, Scholem once again attacked the scientific study of the Talmud and the Jewish proponents of methods imitative of the European method, which sterilize any “oversoul” in Judaism. These people, he said, wished to approach the Talmud “scientifically” but were incapable of studying it in the right way. Scholem saw himself and his contemporaries as a generation of the future which would change everything from top to bottom even if they hit their heads against a wall. This was a generation which aspired to see the Holy Land, the Promised Land in the full sense of the concept. “Where is our Moses?”, asked Scholem. The people in their exile needed a leader like Moses or Jesus: “His name just mustn’t be Hermann Cohen”.7 The youthful, optimistic, and challenging spirit to be found here is cogently expressed in the following declaration: “With Nietzsche we say that the child’s land is the land of the future”.8 Scholem was referring here to Nietzsche’s words in the section “On Old and New Tablets” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: O my brethren, not backward shall your nobility gaze, but outward! Exiles shall ye be from all fatherlands and forefather-lands! Your children’s land shall ye love: let this love be your new nobility, – the undiscovered in the remotest seas! For it do I bid your sails search and search! Unto your children shall ye make amends for being the children of your fathers: all the past shall ye thus redeem! This new table do I place over you! [Z, III, “On Old and New Tables”, 12] At the beginning of 1915, Scholem began his diary with the announcement that the German novelist and writer on the philosophy of art Friedrich Theodor Vischer had made a very great impression on him. Vischer recorded that in his conversations with Schopenhauer, the latter had said that “a stupid devil, the so-called will, created the world”.9 Scholem acknowledged that this insight gave him the understanding that this inspired my speculation into the religiosity in German literature and elsewhere, including inside myself. It’s now obvious that I  don’t believe in a personal God, even less in a being embodying the idea of morality! My God is but an ideal generated by dreams of a fulfilled human life.10 In the nineteenth century, Scholem went on, heaven was broken up until it vanished forever. After the age of romanticism had still retained the old dreams, there were two major periods of change. The first period was represented by Schopenhauer, Marx, and Max Stirner: “Schopenhauer was the one who murdered the absolute

158  The resurrection of myth God. It’s just as Nietzsche said: ‘God is utterly dead, even if his murderer limited himself to metaphysics’ ”. After Schopenhauer came Marx’s turn to shatter the illusions of the transcendental heaven and Stirner’s turn to say kaddish over God: After which a second generation – Strindberg, Nietzsche and Ibsen – came on the scene to rattle heaven with their romanticism. For the upper classes they created a lot more stir in the dubious region of heaven than the other three. Next came Søren Kierkegaard and Tolstoy, two giants who, no doubt, unwittingly destroyed heaven through their deep religiosity. We today have nothing left of the heaven of the past.11 It is extraordinary how perspicacious the young Scholem was in his diary about the illusions of the First World War and the European culture that brought it about. His conclusions anticipated those of Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin.12 The war was a traumatic event for them; unlike many of their peers, they were revolted by it even before it began. They looked on with frustration as their spiritual mentors – Martin Buber for Benjamin and Georg Simmel for Bloch – greeted the war with the enthusiasm of the Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie. In fact, Benjamin refused to write for Buber’s paper Der Jude. Bloch’s greatest disappointment with what he called “the ideas of 1914” and “the utopias of the will” was Simmel’s support for the war. The diary shows Scholem’s negative attitude to the war, an attitude that exhibited intellectual ripening, political understanding, and moral maturity – qualities that could not be ascribed to Buber or Zimmel in this context.13 His hostility to the war grew more and more intense. His meetings with his brother Werner, a communist, in Berlin, and the attempts of certain circles to stand against the violent storm threatening Europe, strengthened his resolve.14 At the same time, as the leader of a small Zionist circle, “Young Judea”, he began to express his opposition to political Zionism. In a letter of September 1914 to his brother Werner, Scholem said he was waiting for his medical examination for the army, in which he said he did not want to serve, and spoke of his relationship with his father, which had reached an impasse. Against this background, he expressed skepticism about the possibility of any laws in history and said he preferred an anarchistic philosophy: Dear Werner, I do not believe in the philosophy of history – whether it be Hegel’s (that is, Marx’s), Ranke’s, or Treitschke’s, or (for all I care) even the negative form of it preached by Nietzsche. In other words, I believe that if history produces laws at all, either history or the laws are worthless. At the very most, I think that only anarchism can be of some use if you really want to prove something through history.15 And, indeed, Nietzsche was the sworn enemy of historicism. Nietzsche’s historical perspectivism was formed by Jacob Burkhardt’s lectures, which he heard in Basle in 1870, and by his opposition to the objectivity claimed by Hegel, as

Zarathustra or Messiah?  159 a philosopher of history, and by Leopold von Ranke as a historian.16 Nietzsche brought a breath of fresh air into the historiographical climate of opinion, which began with a religious belief in the operation of the divine intelligence and ended with the secular challenge of gaining an objective knowledge of history through scientific methods (i.e., historicism). Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801) meant by “historicism” the manifestation of human nature through a study of its historical development and of attempting to predict the course of history by accumulating knowledge.17 The poverty of historicism was challenged, before Karl R. Popper,18 in the debate that took place at the beginning of the Enlightenment. On the one hand, the Swiss philosopher Issak Iselin (1728–1782) maintained in 1764 that Providence predetermined the purpose of history,19 and on the other hand Johann Gottlieb Herder stated in 1774 that history was the chronicle of the actions, forces, and tendencies of human beings in relation to their time and place;20 however, history as a whole was planned by divine Providence according to a comprehensive purpose, the realization of Humanität. In another debate on the question, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) engaged in a dispute with Gotthold E. Lessing (1729–1781). In 1780, Lessing said that revelation could be compared with the process of education: what education is for the individual, revelation is for the human race.21 Mendelssohn could not accept that the aim of Providence was the progress of the human race, and he considered the progress of the individual alone.22 In 1784, the year of publication of Herder’s first book, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Kant wrote his article on History.23 According to Kant, human culture arose as a consequence of “ungesellige Geselligheit” and the cause of history was man’s need to have a master who would compel him to subordinate his own will to that of the master. This problem found its solution in war. The purpose of history, however, was to create a league of nations, which would guarantee man’s freedom. To Voltaire’s pessimistic conclusion in Candide, “Plus ça change, et plus c’est la même chose”, Kant replied with a meaningful concept of history which promoted liberty, reason, and morality. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1782–1814) went a step further: he claimed that the progress of man was accompanied by a corresponding progress in thought and that each historical period represented a new stage in human thinking.24 Schelling (1775–1854) held that history was the proof of the reality of God, and its purpose was to create a world-wide system of government.25 G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) radicalized the concept of history and expected it to end in his time. According to him, the rational and the irrational, reason and instinct, thesis, and antithesis all dialectically promoted the purposes of history. In the Hegelian theodicy, theological tradition and the rational challenge were interfused. Hegel’s philosophical system marked the end of traditional history.26 At the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, the historians in Germany took the place of the philosophers, and historiography dealt with matters previously treated by philosophy. As against the scientific historiographical pretensions of the school of Ranke, the young Scholem was convinced for a while that he was destined to be the

160  The resurrection of myth Messiah. Buber, his Zionist hero, and the hero of his generation of Jews, was cast in the role of prophet, like Nathan of Gaza: He only wanted to prepare the way for someone greater than he who was to come. He sacrificed himself for the others, for those he did not know but whose blood he shares. He was not the redeemer. [. . .] Beyond searching and the crying out, fulfillment also stirred in him. At first he didn’t recognize this fulfillment, nor did he yet know its object [. . .]. This young man went alone through the world and looked around to find where the soul of the nation awaited him. He believed deeply that the soul of Judea wandered aimlessly among the nations and in the Holy Land, awaiting the One who would have enough audacity to free it from banishment and from the separation from its national body. Deep down inside he knew that he was the Chosen One who was to search for his people’s soul, and to find it; that he must equip himself to pave the way for the soul’s discovery. [. . .] The simple man’s way is the path of redemption. And who is this dreamer, whose name already marks him as the Awaited One? It is Scholem, the Perfect One. It was he who equipped himself for his work and began to powerfully forge together weapons of knowledge.27 A few months later, Scholem changed his mind, and declared, “At this moment I no longer believe as I once did that I’m the Messiah”.28 The historian Michael Brenner said that Scholem met Buber about five months after he wrote this, and readers of the diary cannot help raising an ironic smile at the thought of the relationship that must have existed between the would-be Messiah and his designated prophet.29 It is clear that contrary to the criticisms leveled by some Kabbala scholars, Scholem was by no means a stranger to subjects that he wrote about such as mysticism and Messianism.30 Casting oneself as the Messiah was nothing unusual at that time: we know of Theodor Herzl’s Messianic vision and the Messianic secular-universalist outlook of David Ben-Gurion. The Herzl legend is enveloped in a Messianic halo. Herzl internalized it to such a degree that he made a comparison between himself and Shabbetai Zevi: The difference between me and Shabbetai Zevi as I imagine him, apart from developments in technical resources due to the difference in periods, is that Shabbetai Zevi raised himself up to resemble the great ones of the earth, while I find the great ones of the earth to be as small as I am.31 Dr. Joseph Bloch warned him against the temptation of presenting himself as a Messiah, as all the Messiahs “had brought disastrous consequences upon the Jews”. He said that as soon as a Messiah “puts on flesh and blood, he ceases to be a redeemer”.32 Herzl, however, did not trip up and did not cross the Shabbetaian threshold. When King Victor Emmanuel the Third told Herzl, when they met in 1904, that one of his distant relatives had been connected with Shabbetai Zevi, and

Zarathustra or Messiah?  161 he asked if there were still any Jews expecting the Messiah, Herzl replied, “Naturally, Your Majesty, in the religious circles. In our own, the academically trained and enlightened circles, no such thought exists, of course [. . .]. Our movement is purely nationalist”. Herzl added that on his journey to Palestine he refrained from riding on a donkey “so that no one would embarrass me by thinking I was the Messiah”.33 When Ben-Gurion was ten years old, in 1896, the year of the publication of Herzl’s The Jewish State, as he accompanied his father to pray in the synagogue, he heard that “it was being said in the town that the Messiah was on his way, and he was now in Vienna, and he had a black beard and his name was Herzl”.34 It was said that he was “tall and handsome and had a black beard – an extraordinary man”.35 Ben-Gurion looked at his picture and decided “to follow him immediately to the land of my fathers”. And the founder of the Jewish State wrote about the prophet of the Jewish State: “Herzl was indeed like a Messiah since he galvanized the feeling of the youth that Eretz-Israel was achievable. He added, however, that it could only come to pass if we built it with our own hands”.36 The young Ben-Gurion’s recognition that doing it “with our own hands” was the sole condition for realizing Herzl’s secular Messianism was central in molding his political and intellectual path. In his mythification of Herzl, Ben-Gurion contrasts exile, which is “slavery” and the “darkness of the cemetery”, with Herzlian Zionism which epitomizes freedom, light and resurrection. In another place he describes the exile as “a miserable experience, wretched, bitter, contemptible, nothing to be proud of. On the contrary  – it has to be totally rejected”.37 Ben Gurion’s negation of the exile was to influence his ideas of “shortening the path” of history and breaking the continuity of Jewish history.38 These two statesmen worked in their mature years to realize Zionism, their early Messianic vision.39 And the young self-appointed Messiah became the doyen of historians of Jewish Messianism. In a confession striking in its honesty, Scholem declared, “I  can never provide a narrative in which I  do not play the leading role”. Thus, we see that in his attack on political Zionism he was really aiming at Herzl, the head of the pyramid. The intellectual atmosphere in which he lived explains his revulsion at politics, his attachment to the cultural sphere and his attraction to the anarchic. Scholem wanted to be the ultimate revolutionary, a Zionist revolutionary: Our guiding principle is revolution! Revolution everywhere! We don’t want reform or reeducation but revolution or renewal. We desire to absorb revolution into our innermost souls. There are external and internal revolutions [. . .]. We should be revolutionaries and always and everywhere say who we are, what we are, and what we want. For the sake of Judah we want to fight it out with our foes. Above all, we want to revolutionize Judaism. We want to revolutionize Zionism and to preach anarchism and freedom from all authority. We will go to battle against all autocrats [. . .]. We wish to rip away the formalistic facade from Zionism. In doing so we’ve arrived at Herzl, but only taking from him the force of his personality. We reject him. He’s to blame

162  The resurrection of myth for today’s Zionism – a movement that instead of going forward looks backwards, an organization of shopkeepers that grovels in the dust before the powerful! Zionism is Mauschel!! It has taken up the Jewish problem merely as a form instead of in its inner essence. Its only thought has been the Jewish state. We preachers of anarchism reject this. We don’t want a state. We want a free society, and Herzl’s Old-New Land hasn’t a thing to do with this! We Jews are not a people of the state, go to Palestine to found a state, thereby forging new chains out of the old [. . .]. We want to go to Palestine out of a thirst for freedom and longing for the future. The future belongs to the Orient.40 Scholem’s Zionist revolution was one that worked through changing hearts and not through political action, through Judaism and not through diplomacy, through a culture and not through a State. The expression he used, “the idol of the state” was taken from the chapter on the new idol in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not where we live, my brothers: here there are states [. . .]. State is the name of the coldest of all monsters” [Z, I, “On the New Idol”]. Nietzsche added, “The gentlest words are those that bring on the storm”. Nearby were also quoted the words of Buber, who pointed out that the decisions are not made in a proud spirit but in a state of humility. Scholem concluded that great events take place far from the noise of the storm, in the depths of things and not externally. “Remarkably enough”, added Scholem”, Nietzsche apparently didn’t know Kierkegaard, not even the monograph by Brandes”.41 Scholem, referring to the correspondence between Nietzsche and his Jewish friend, Georg Brandes, continued, “But listen to what’s written in ‘Of a Thousand and One Aims’: First nations were creative, and only later were individuals. Truly, the individual himself is the most recent creation”.42 After citing Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Scholem added, “Isn’t this astounding?” On the 15th of November  1915, the first anniversary of his diary, Scholem wrote that he would stop keeping the diary as he was about to be called up. About a week later, he made a surprising announcement: We are Jews, which is a statement that must be properly understood. That we are also humans shall be called out with a full voice because some (or many) of my friends have forgotten it. It is no proof of one’s Zionism to think that being Jewish is to occupy oneself only with Jewish matters. Someone can be Jewish and be with Jean Paul, Gottfried Keller, and Friedrich Nietzsche. You can’t crawl out of your own skin, and for a Jew who knows something about his Judaism, there is nothing non-Jewish that can do damage to him if it’s not damaging to other people. It’s nonsense to assume that pursuing something else could lead you away from Zionism. Zionism is the presupposition for this pursuit. [. . .]. This is a lesson I’ve experienced and have understood over the past year.43 Scholem’s self-respect as a Jew made him declare that there is no contradiction between being Jewish and being a human being, between being Jewish and being

Zarathustra or Messiah?  163 a follower of Nietzsche, between being a Zionist and being universal. As the son of an assimilated Jewish family, he went a long way – from nihilism to Zionism: From nothingness I  went to Orthodoxy, and from there I  continued on to Buber; and from Buber – by giving him up – I arrived at Zion. [. . .]. Is the Bible’s divinity rooted in its humanity, as I  once thought? No.  Its divinity goes far, far deeper. It is not in myth, but in its view of history [. . .] Judaism is the absolute truth, it follows that the Bible and the Torah are divine. For this reason, one can employ the Bible as a proof. [. . .]. At the very core of Judaism lies the belief that there is a revelation from God, and this is something no modern man can grasp. This is the point that Kierkegaard never understood, which comes out clearly in his brand of Christianity. [. . .] Like Plato, he was Oriental, which is surely part of the problem with him, as it was with Nietzsche. For he approached philosophy from the question of history. [. . .] He too tried to overcome historical skepticism by going to its source. There absolutely nothing more devastating than the scientific study of the Bible. [. . .] The Bible is the eternal Untimely Meditations. The Messiah will come during the generation in which the Bible is also “externally” relevant.44 These sections of the diary were written in October  1916. At the height of the war they bear witness to Scholem’s consolidated Zionist outlook. Judaism, Bible, and Zion are the ultimate answer to the nihilist escape that lies at the heart of the European crisis. Modernism is unable to explain the divine revelation; the philosophy of history is impotent in face of the mystery of Jewish existence; science cannot decipher the Bible. Out of all the works one can think of, Scholem chose Nietzsche’s early essays, Untimely Meditations (not the works generally considered most important), as ideal models of praise of the Bible – a clear sign of Scholem’s respectful attitude to Nietzsche. As we know that many of Scholem’s pithy statements in his diary were of Nietzschean derivation, and as we know that Zarathustra inspired him, the historian Steve Aschheim comments, “We may regard his later statements as at best disingenuous”45 Here one can offer an explanation: Scholem was not exceptional in distancing himself later on from Nietzsche, who had been a source of inspiration for him in his youth, as he was for many Jewish thinkers in Europe at an early stage of their intellectual development. Nietzsche was not regarded as just another thinker one could boast of. Dependence on him as a source of inspiration automatically identified the person influenced with the one who influenced, which was something inadvisable at a certain period in the case of a thinker considered one of the progenitors of the Nazis. Here one should remember that Nietzsche called for morality to be turned on its head, that he despised all liberal norms and humanist values and founded a new philosophy of will to power. All this did not help his reputation, especially during and after the Second World War, and people of mature years, whose outlook was already formed, chose to deny him as a thinker who inspired them when they were molding their personality. It is natural that creators who achieve greatness wish to kick away the ladder they climbed up.

164  The resurrection of myth

In search of myth The phenomenology of Jewish myth, Scholem’s main preoccupation after the First World War, was suited to the European and Jewish intellectual climate of opinion in the period between the two World Wars. Scholem belonged to the current of European thought that searched for the mythical roots of modern man, which included Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade in the general sphere, and Franz Rozenzweig and Martin Buber in the Jewish sphere. Like the German intellectuals Julius Langbehn, Paul de Lagarde, and Moeller van den Bruck, Scholem discerned a politics of cultural despair in Germany, and like the agents of the conservative revolution Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jünger, he identified the nihilism at the heart of the German consciousness.46 Unlike them, however, he envisaged a Promethean horizon beyond the boundaries of the Rhine: the possibility of founding a cultural community in Palestine, where he would help to give birth to a new Jewish civilization. The philosophical critique of the Enlightenment and the criticism of the German ideology influenced one another and were interconnected: “In the manner of Nietzsche, he saw these two enemies as one”.47 Like Freud and Kafka, for example, Scholem took part in the post-Nietzschean criticism of the Enlightenment and reason, and like them he wanted to reveal the hidden dimensions of the human soul, and especially that of the Jew, which had been hidden beneath a rational conceptual cover until it had almost disappeared. This cultural and political intellectual atmosphere molded the young Scholem, influenced his decision to study the foundations of Jewish mysticism and found expression in his Jewish historiographical enterprise. The romantic nationalism in Europe took hold of many young people whose search for their roots harmonized with their revolt against abstract rationalism. The cult of national renewal and the longing for a revival of myth was not only typical of young Jews. Herder was the one who flung open the doors of modern nationalism, and the German romantics after him searched for their national roots and participated in the national revival in the nineteenth century.48 Scholem, a disciple of the German Bildung, belonged to the romantic national movement of the beginning of the twentieth century, and it swept him onto the shores of Jewish national historiography.49 What the German national awakening and the Jewish national renaissance had in common was the attempt to locate in the culture of the past bodies of symbolism, religious rituals and sacred texts that would give lasting significance and authenticity to modern romanticism. For Scholem, the history of religion was first and foremost symbology, a matter that was the common interest of the Eranos circle – a circle of leading historians of religion of which Scholem was a member and which gathered under the inspiration of Carl Gustav Jung in Ascona in Switzerland from the end of the 1940s until 1976.50 This group gave itself the mission of investigating the phenomenology of religious symbols. Scholem claimed that the living God speaks in symbols, and that “Judaism was more than anything else a corpus symbolicum” (ibid.). The symbol is the mechanism that activates religious experience as well as national consciousness. It is not surprising that one of the main symbols that Scholem

Zarathustra or Messiah?  165 investigated was the star of David, and he traced the genealogy of its progress in the Middle Ages, in Sabbataeanism, in the Haskalah, and in Zionism. The symbol, whose origin was medieval, was not originally Jewish, but was a traditional talisman against the powers of evil, and it gained a Jewish significance only in the nineteenth century.51 From the Haskalah and the Zionist movements to the Nazi regime, this magic symbol was adopted in Europe as representative of the Jewish people. The Nazis gave the star of David a yellow color, which symbolized the return of the Jews to a state of degradation and finally extermination. Some claim that in Scholem’s genealogical investigation he humanized the symbol of the Jewish people, so taking it out of the hands of its conservative guardians and making it into a universal symbol. This symbol represented even the Reform Jews who are known for their desire to obliterate any mystical or magical element in modern Judaism. And there are some who criticize Scholem for claiming that the extermination of the European Jews is what gave the symbol a mythical significance. Like many Germans, he gave the Second World War and the history of modern Europe an apocalyptic interpretation as a mythical event. It may be that he himself contributed to the connection of nationalism with mysticism.52 Already in his first work, Scholem asserted that the connection between nationhood and mysticism is not only a fortuitous, technical, or historical one but represents a deep existential affinity. Henry Pachter thought that this was a Copernican turning-point in historiography. Until Scholem, it was believed that mysticism had various cultural branches, but Scholem showed that Jewish mysticism, which was not influenced by its environment apart from technical influences, did not conform to this idea. Only a people that had experienced the suffering and shock of the Spanish exile could have developed the myth of God Himself living in exile and holding back the goodness of the world, a world in which evil held sway. Only such a people could suppose that God gives a message of total liberation from captivity, a special message to the Jewish people. The mythical significance of the Kabbala was particular, a significance that applied solely to the Jewish people and could not be understood by others. To such a degree was it impossible to untie the Gordian knot between the national aspect and the mystical aspect.53 Robert Alter, however, proposed another, universal explanation. Although at the heart of the Kabbala, especially the Kabbala of Yitzhak Luria, there is a strong element of national rebirth, at the same time there is a pronounced universal aspect expressed in the formulation of an all-embracing cosmological doctrine. This understanding of the Kabbala gives us a new view of the rise of modern Jewish nationalism: Zionism can be seen as an attempt to renew the Jewish people in a universal perspective.54 According to the model of the Lurian Kabbala, the revival of the Jewish State can strengthen the universal nature of Jewish nationhood and not turn the nation into an isolated island in the Middle East. So, does the Kabbala belong to the Jewish national heritage or to the universal religious tradition? Scholem believed that a myth and a people are close to each other: a nation cannot forgo any part of its past.55 The Reform Jews who wanted to have a rational religion and to assimilate into the Western Enlightenment were bewildered by mystical and magical elements and ideas connected to

166  The resurrection of myth the Kabbala, and that was the reason for their attempt to obliterate the memory of kabbalistic texts. Scholem said that although the practices of the Kabbala could not be revived, their memory could be. The historical chapter of the Kabbala had to be reconnected to the other chapters in the history of the Jewish people. The revival of the Kabbala was not only a matter of historiographical importance but a matter of national importance. Scholem looked for a myth that would support the miracle of the renewal of Jewish culture. Myths become pragmatic as soon as they are given a role within the continuity of history, and that, in fact, is what Nietzsche and Scholem intended.56 The myth of the Kabbala was intended for a Messianic mobilization, and here Scholem was a good example of the history-myth dialectic. Myth lies outside the historical consciousness, but at the same time it operates in history and molds it. The myths taken from history – the Bar-Kochba rebellion, the expulsion from Spain or the Messiahship of Shabbetai Zvi – became a-historical myths because they were detached from their time and nourished the historical memory. The reconstruction of history provided examples of how to change the present moment. Scholem traced the inner logic of the rise and fall of myths in Jewish culture in order to accelerate the progress of Jewish history in his time. In this he did not make a rationalization of history but rebelled against the idea that reason is the main factor that molds, or ought to mold, reality. At the beginning of the modern age when the ghettoized Jewish world of eastern and central Europe began to undergo a process of modernization, many Jewish groups sincerely believed that a new age was at hand. They had the feeling that they saw the beginning of Messianic redemption. The heavenly city was about to become a permanent reality; the contradiction between the Messianic vision and the vale of tears was about to be effaced; the dream would become true. To those who believed this, said Scholem, “the presence of a Messianic reality seemed entirely in harmony with the outward course of even”.57 The researches of the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and his successors seem to support Scholem’s assertions by showing that myth in primitive societies is not a product of the artistic imagination or an intellectual explanation but a reality of life.58 Primitive communities do not experience life in a simultaneous way – reality and vision, history and utopia. This way of seeing requires a critical faculty that only develops with the processes of secularization and modernization. In the seventeenth-century, a synthesis became possible between the traditional Messianic idea and the kabbalistic vision with the appearance of the Lurian Kabbala, which prepared the intellectual climate in which Sabbetai Sevi sprang up. A transformation took place in the concept of national liberation, which changed its meaning from release from foreign rule to an all-embracing Messianic cosmology. It was no longer a matter of changing of historical situation but a cosmological upheaval; no longer the aspiration to the independence of the Hebrew nation as the vanguard of a universal Messianic era but a cosmic redemption, the reparation of the “shattered” universe, and the restoration of the unified structure of the worlds. The kabbalists transformed the outward manifestations of redemption into symbols of a spiritual process. Ernst Cassirer has already taught us that man is a landscape of symbols. The philosopher of symbolic forms claimed that man lives

Zarathustra or Messiah?  167 in a dimension that is not only the natural world but also the world of symbols. Language, art, religion, science, and myth are the complex threads of the human enterprise, which is a network of coordinates by means of which we make our way in the world.59 The study of Kabbala meant for Scholem first and foremost turning his back on the abstract philosophy of the middle class and a rejection of the rational man it created – a golem of bourgeois culture. Like Marx and Freud who in their different ways sought to restore humanism to the alienated technological modern era, Scholem used his kabbalistic insights for the same purpose. He knew that man as homo mythicus could not satisfy his intellect by means of the idealistic philosophy. Because Jewish philosophy did not provide answers to the anxieties concerning life and death, it had to pay a high price for its estrangement from the primitive foundations of man’s life. Jewish thinkers preferred to see evil and the demonic as problems to be thrust aside, not as problems from which myths are created. The same way of thinking made Scholem reveal the sexual and feminine sides of God. He devoted all his time and energy to the study of Jewish symbolism, and the results of his investigations shook the foundations of rabbinic Judaism just as Freud shocked Victorian society with his discoveries.60 Unlike prophetic Judaism, in which the godhead is an entity without characteristics who is represented in the Bible in an allegorical way like the commandments in the works of an Aristotelian philosopher like Maimonides, Jewish mysticism gave the godhead a mythological life and a symbolic significance. The kabbalists, who brought back the pagan principles of magical religions, said that theosophy and myth bridged the enormous gap between the abstract deity and his symbolic representations. The mystical movements which flourished along the Rhine and in Provence particularly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries appear to have been influenced by the gnostics. Whereas the researches of Hans Jonas abound in kabbalist-gnostic parallels, Scholem tried to play them down.61 In both systems, the gnostic and the kabbalist, knowledge liberates and deepens the sphere of consciousness. The gnostics believed that there are sparks hidden in the world which need to be liberated so that the creation can be united with the godhead. In addition to the overlapping of the gnostic concept of alienation and the kabbalistic concept of exile, there is also a great similarity between the Lurian cosmology and the gnostic view of the creation. In the political sphere, said Bloch, Fascism has borrowed from Gnosticism the myth in which the forces of darkness steal the light in order to create a world of illusions. This latent truth, found in an authentic community, is not of this world: hence it is an illusion, a dream – a fraud. Bloch does announce the death of religion, but rather the secularization of myth: Marxism, for him, unlike Fascism, has failed to accord myth its due importance. Bloch interprets myth as a different type of consciousness, one that captures the restorative force of tradition. Some of Scholem’s commentators see Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy as the historiographical model chosen by the Jewish scholar.62 Just as the German philosopher found in early Greece the model of inspiration for the creation of a myth for the German people, so Scholem went back to the Middle Ages and the

168  The resurrection of myth beginning of modern times in order to create a national myth for the modern Jews. In his lectures at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York in 1959, Scholem said that he envied the German historians who yearned for a comprehensive and active understanding of their historical organism in a national perspective and futuristic orientation. A commitment of this kind is often found in historiography when historians decide to be creators of myths of their nation. They do not boast of setting up a universalist intellectual republic whose cosmopolitan language would transcend national frontiers. The idea that universal ideas can be realized by national means has died out.63 Henceforth, the truth is fragmented: there is a Jewish truth, a Nazi truth, imperialist and liberal truths, and so on. Pachter warns against a dangerous viewpoint of this kind, especially when expressed by Jews living in Israel. That, precisely, is the trouble: this distortion of historiography is liable to gain acceptance among the modern or the engagés in the form of a counter-culture or as in the Frankfurt school.64 The sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies was the first theoretician to create a conceptual infrastructure for what I call a “community of experience”. In his major work Community and Society (1887), he distinguished between the social entities Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.65 All groups and social relationships, as products of human thought and the human will, were social entities for Tönnies. He saw these as encompassing social collectives, social corporations, and social relationships. The first kind of social entity was a product of the “natural will” (Wesenwille): that is, an action undertaken for its own sake, representing a “natural” action or an action resulting from social pressures, habit, aesthetic, or moral values, etc. The second kind was the product of the “rational will” (Kurwille), a conscious choice of a certain objective among several possibilities. In matching up these two types of will with social entities, Tönies distinguished between the entities that are objects of the Wesenwille and those that are objects of the Kurwille. Community (Gemeinschaft) is a social entity derived from Wesenwille: for example, social clubs, religious sects, derive from mutual sympathy, habit, or shared beliefs. Partnerships, neighborliness cities, and spiritual communities are manifestations of “community”, while “society” (Gesellschaft) is a social entity deriving from Kurwille: for example, most professional associations, which are means to achieve specific goals. Contractual, collective relationships based on common interests and organizations for specific purposes are characteristic of “society”. The distinction between “community” and “society” is not dichotomous but representative of “ideal types”. Scholem, following Buber, wished to create a Jewish “community” in Palestine on the lines conceived by Tönnies. Modern society deprives people of their individuality and neglects the virtues of the traditional community and the natural relationships of family and friends. Liberal society leaves people “soulless”, and the results of the Enlightenment can be described as what George Zimmel called modern man’s “estrangement” from his roots. One can understand in this context the myth of the expulsion from Eden and the legend of the wandering Jew.66 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the call to return to the life of the community was heard once again. Romantic nationalism that expressed a sense of community challenged the liberal, universalist, and rationalist tendencies of the time. A consequence of this was that one

Zarathustra or Messiah?  169 could point to the “other”, the enemy, the source of alienation  – the Jew. It is thus ironic that while the antisemites blamed the Jewish domination for the loss of their souls, Scholem declared that it was rather the Jews who had lost their uniqueness by yielding to the domination of the Germans. As long as the nationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century was a cultural rebellion against the liberal world of his father, Scholem could allow himself to be open to the German and Jewish currents of his generation, but as a Jew reared and educated in Wilhelmine Germany, he was unable to join the national romantics of his time. His protest took the form of anti-German feelings and a hankering after Jewish tradition. These circumstances and the direction of his thought were interactive, and the concepts that henceforth dominated his researches were exile and redemption. The exposure of Jewish nationalism in Palestine as a strain of German nationalism which sought as a secular movement to solve a spiritual problem by secular means, and the arrogance of seeking to rescue the Jews at the expense of the rescue of Judaism, caused Scholem to leave political Zionism. He settled in Palestine in 1923 not in order to set up a State but to revive a cultural community which had theological roots and to re-establish its Jewish essence. In contrast to the Promethean passion of secular Zionism to give birth to the “new Hebrew” in his country, Scholem at the outset of his career tended towards the mystical nationalism cultivated by the German youth movements and the first pioneering waves of immigration, a romantic nationalism in the spirit of Buber or Tolstoy. In Palestine he wished to find redemption from the German exile. Scholem found in Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch and among the thinkers of the Frankfurt school the Jewish roots of utopian thought, a way of thinking common both to him and to them.67 Scholem rejected the Marxist starting-point and its conclusion that Messianic movements are social ones.68 He believed, on the contrary, that the Messianic myth was primarily religious. He saw Ernst Bloch’s book on Thomas Müntzer,69 for example, as an expressionistic manifestation of Karl Kautsky’s Marxist essays.70 Rejecting the neo-Kantian view of myth as pre-­ scientific thinking, Bloch holds that it is the very core of a symbolic culture. If in 1918 Bloch believed that myth could offer hope for the future, by 1935, he had come to understand its destructive potential, like Ernst Cassirer, who in 1924 wrote about the swastika in a neutral vein. Bloch believed in the transcendent quality of myth: symbolic culture is born of an unsatisfied hunger, a state of depression, which seeks to break out of its limitations. Secularization merely made possible the context in which myth gained ascendancy, the possibility of a renewed experience of the essence that bygone ages had given to myth: “the savior (Reiland) still lives and will return”. Walter Benjamin, too, was bent on saving myth – by means of allegory. In addition to the criticism of the Enlightenment and the criticism of the bourgeois ideology, a Messianic approach was common to Scholem and Bloch, Benjamin, and the Frankfurt school as a basic pattern of their thinking.

Messianism through nihilism When the contradiction came to light in Scholem’s analysis of Sabbetaianism between symbol and reality, experience, and history  – the experience of inner

170  The resurrection of myth freedom with the appearance of Sabbetai Sevi and the final disappointment of an anti-mythical reality – “heretical Sabbetaianism” was born. The refusal of Sabbetaian believers to admit that the experience was illusory gave birth to a theology (which Scholem called an ideology) designed to throw a bridge over the abyss that opened out between the external reality and the inner experience. The psychological foundation of this Sabbetaian theology was the paradox of the Messiah’s apostasy. It was felt to be impossible that so many people could have been mistaken in their perception of the situation. Perhaps the interpretation was wrong, so one needed a different interpretation. In the face of the sense of disappointment, frustration, and failure bound up with the Messiah’s betrayal, the believers refused, or rather, were unable, to return to the life of the ghetto, the world of yesterday. The door had been locked behind them. The eye that beheld the ways of modernity discovered a new ethos of life, an ethos replete with vital principles and spiritual powers repressed in the old world of ghetto Judaism. This new outlook on life, which German thought was later to call a Lebensphilosophie, took the form of a proclamation by the Sabbetaian extremists of a revolt against the halachic norms, the laws and statutes and system of values of rabbinic Judaism. Sabbetaianism set itself up as a counter-culture to the world of the Jewish ghetto of the past. The Sabbataian theology recognized a special class of “spiritualists”, exceptional individuals, men of spiritual elevation who succeeded in penetrating a world that was all holiness and spirit. These men of elevation, like Nietzsche’s Übermensch, had qualities not given to the generality of mankind. They usually lived as a sect in an enclosed space, a spiritual heterotopia, to use Michel Foucault’s expression, and kept a distance from a normative way of life.71 One should remember that a sect is different from an order. A sect is a group of people that isolates itself from normative society in order to pursue a closed lifestyle, while an order is an organization of people who set themselves up as an ideal example of a counter-culture, an ideal microcosm of a perfect society, and in Scholem’s words, “they claim to be the vanguard of a new world”. Scholem pointed out that after the Second Temple period, Jewish tradition did not encourage the phenomenon of “spiritualists”, some of whom went over to Christianity. In Hassidism, for instance, there were men of spiritual pretension who considered themselves superior beings, but the regulatory mechanisms of the Hassidic community prevented their descent into nihilism. Hassidism, like Sabbetaianism, rejected the external world, but, unlike it, stopped short on the edge of the abyss. Unlike in Hassidism, said Scholem, the psychological structure of the spiritualists was taken from the Sabbetaian movement, which regarded itself as a purely spiritual movement of “elevated individuals”, Übermenschen, who sought to undermine the existing ideological, religious, and social order and raze it to the foundations.72 The more extreme Sabbataians were not content with the vision of a utopia that gave hope for the future or spiritual aid in difficult times. The believers really and truly believed that they were living at the peak of the time of tikkun (reparation), and they were consequently subject to new laws. An objective misunderstanding of the leader’s conversion gave way to the subjective view that they alone were honored with enlightenment: that is, a unique understanding of the

Zarathustra or Messiah?  171 meaning of the apostasy. The Sabbetaian “secret” made a distinction between the kabbalistic believer and the common people. This knowledge made the believer a free man, a man who enjoyed “Messianic liberty”, although the freedom he enjoyed contradicted the facts of the external reality, and the Sabbetaian theology came into being to resolve this difference.73 Fragments of the secret of the coming of redemption were revealed to the believer and his friends: not the whole secret but a sort of inner revelation, a certain testimony to the renewal of the world. New aspects of the Torah were revealed, “inward faces” (pnim pnima’im). The common denominator of all the members and believers of this spiritual sect was this “secret”, to which only they, as “superior people”, were privy. This cleavage between the religious secret of the “men of spiritual elevation” and normative religion is not only found in the history of Judaism but also in the history of Christianity, and it played a major role in the formation of the cultural development which authorized the intellectual climate of modernity. Scholem himself noted the affinities between the Christian sects and currents and the European Enlightenment, but one must add that they also influenced the anti-Enlightenment tradition. Underlying the Sabbetaian enlightenment-by-way-of reaction was a paradoxical theology that sought to explain the rationality of “strange acts” (ma’asim zarim), and, especially the strangest thing of all, the apostasy of the Messiah.74 The Sabbetaian theologians Nathan of Gaza and Abraham Carduzo developed a daring and imaginative concept, the starting-point of which was the dispersion of the sparks of holiness in original sin among the kelipot (the hylic forces of evil whose hold on the world is particularly strong among the Gentiles) of the nations of the world. As a result of this, redemption will only come from someone who will penetrate the thick darkness, immerse himself in the 49 gates of defilement and restore the sparks to their place. The act of redemption will be crowned with success only with the death of the kelipa: the redeeming end justifies the reprehensible means. This discrepancy between the seemingly noble intentions and the reprehensible means, between the acceptable purpose and the way laden with obstacles, paradoxically became the very heart of the nihilistic Sabbetaian theology. The historical precedent and sociological basis of this theology was the anusim (Marranos), descendants of Spanish Jewry who in difficult times had to develop a lifestyle of dual reality, concealment, and two-facedness. This Janus face of the anusim living in two worlds prepared the ground for a new religious metaphysics that bestowed upon the Sabbetaian Messiah a crown of Marranism. The real difference between the Spanish anusim and the Sabbetaian ones was the theological innovation of the latter in which, unlike in the former, the Messiah was created by a voluntary act, an act of will. The age-old concept of national redemption was now viewed as irrelevant, and in its place the Sabbataian paradox was the jewel in the crown.75 The apostasy, the kelipa and impurity lost their abject status and became the very basis of the Sabbetaian Messianism. One should remember that in the background there was the tragic precedent of Jesus who was crucified when he came to redeem humanity. In Sabbetaian history, the point of gravity shifted from the death of the Messiah to his apostasy, for there was an essential difference between the two Messianisms.

172  The resurrection of myth In Christian theology, there was no specific person who committed a particular sin, but men were born into original sin which was sin of a metaphysical nature that could not be absolved through human means. The only way of being saved from it was through the crucifixion of the Deity: that is, absolution and rectification were only possible through an act of self-annihilation. Thus, the divinity was embodied in a man who came down from heaven to absolve the sins of mankind. Its absolution was through its crucifixion, its negation.76 The metaphysical annihilation gave mankind its validity. The death of the Messiah was to the benefit of man, to whom it gave the potential of a righteous existence, but in Sabbetaian Messianism, the Messiah’s apostasy meant the annulment of the commandments and prohibitions. There was also another basic difference. Jesus, in the Sabbataian view, was not only a transitory earthly Messiah but a husk, a covering for the true Messiah.77 Not only was the true messianism concealed in Jacob Frank, but there was a suggestion here of a revolutionary theory that the husk that was the Christian Church would be exposed as such and destroyed. It should be pointed out that Judaism had a different approach to messianism from Christianity, and its approach to redemption was also different. The various currents of historical Judaism saw redemption as something that transpired in the public domain in history, while Christian theology, whose focus was on sin and absolution, was concerned with the personal redemption of the individual. Christianity was a bitter enemy of all political messianic movements because they proclaimed that they came to replace it. Their proclamation of a national or universal redemption based on a political vision of the removal of social disharmony was in opposition to the Christian perception of history as a process of regression and decline. Sabbetaianism gave birth to a radical religious terminology unprecedented in the history of the Jewish religion. Like a magnet, it attracted believers drawn to a revolutionary conceptual scheme of things, “a dialectical eruption of new forces in the midst of old concepts”.78 The believers were filled with a sense of mission, felt they were participating in a cosmological revolution that destroyed the old world, and prepared a new one in which the fall of the Messiah was the key to the understanding of the old expression, “redemption through sin”. The reversal that had taken place was not a transgression but a good deed. This new approach resulted in two different kinds of Sabbetaianism. The first, moderate Sabbetaianism, saw the Messiah’s apostasy not as an example to be followed but an abomination, and therefore not binding. The moderate believers decided not to abandon the values of normative Judaism and not to question the meaning of the commandments. They set boundaries to “alien sanctity” and stopped short of entering its depths. The second kind was extreme Sabbetaianism, antinomian and nihilistic in character. From a radical religious movement that aimed at reform and had a messianic flavor Sabbetaianism became a nihilistic phenomenon divorced from the ideology from which it set forth into the world.79 Was Sabbetaianism a modern reappearance of ancient gnosticism?80 Scholem found gnostic principles in the Sabbetaian theology. He discovered a “Jewish gnosis” from talmudic times to the eighteenth century: in the literature of Hechalot

Zarathustra or Messiah?  173 and the Merkava, in the twelfth-century Sefer Ha-Bahir, in the kabbalistic writings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Provence, in the kabbalistic circle of the “Cohen brothers” in thirteenth-century Castile, in the Book of the Zohar, in Lurian kabbalism, and, finally, in the Sabbetaian movement. Joseph Dan suggests that the affinity between gnostic ideas and Jewish mysticism was a typological similarity and not the result of a historical influence.81 According to this conception, there can be a resemblance between the basic semiological and conceptual character of spiritual phenomena in different cultures, but this does not mean there is a factual and empirical connection between them. From this one might conclude that Scholem’s perception of Jewish mysticism as a gnostic phenomenon was a typological one. Scholem explained that the gnostics distinguished between a good God who had disappeared and the righteous God who gave the Torah. They rejected the biblical Creator, the God of Israel; they saw the supreme God as a hidden God outside the world who was not yet revealed but was slightly discernible in his sparks still scattered in the world, which was evil. The good God sent Jesus and the gnostic believers to annul the rule of the “God of the Jews”. The gnostic idea that the teachings of the Jews and Christians were basically mistaken was a major cause of metaphysical antisemitism in the history of Christianity. The secret of the godhead based on the gnostic paradox was a Sabbetaian innovation of the school of Abraham Cardozo.82 According to this, the existence of a First Cause does not require proof as it is recognized by all. What, then, is special about religious revelation? What is special in revelation is the discovery of a religious basis that had not been previously known. Revelation is really the uncovering of the creating and redeeming God to whom believers pray. The root of Judaism is the paradox of the existence of a divinity who is not a First Cause. Judaism’s revolutionary move amounted to a gnostic change of values. The hidden God, who was not good, became a theoretical God outside the scope of theology. The bottom line was that the true God was the God of Israel who gave the Torah. This faith was shattered in exile, and in its place, one had the mistaken belief that God was the First Cause. This Sabbetaian assertion was a revolutionary turningpoint in the emergence of the audacious idea that exilic Judaism had believed in a false God, a First Cause, and a correction was therefore needed. It was a notion that frightened the Jewish religious authorities, who feared for the continuity of historical Judaism. The “Orthodox” of that time could not accept such a revolutionary historical and theological turnabout, and the only option they had was to reject the revolution together with the revolutionaries. The denial of the exilic life and the exilic faith according to Scholem brought to light the passionate convictions of the Sabbetaians concerning the restoration of the life of the past. While moderate Sabbetaianism was careful not to cross the threshold into nihilism, extreme Sabbetaianism declared: “Let us cram the maw of impurity with the power of holiness until it bursts from within”.83 The word tehom (chasm or abyss) recurs in Scholem’s essay, and it was the key word in the nihilistic theology of the radical Sabbetaians. “The philosophy of the chasm”, if one can call it that, was in Scholem’s words, “the spiritual platform for the outbreak of the great nihilistic conflagration in extreme Sabbetaianism”. Here several factors

174  The resurrection of myth coalesced – religious beliefs, spiritual tendencies, and anarchistic impulses – and together lit the Sabbetaian fire. The revolutionary euphoria and sense of freedom, now that all impediments had been removed and all partitions had collapsed, removed the few restrictions of the Jewish norms that still remained.84 Sabbetai Sevi and Jacob Frank, unlike Bar-Kochba, did not go forth to war. As soon as it transpired, said Scholem, that, as a result of the chasm between the external world and the inner reality, the objective reality had to be denied, Messianism was transformed into nihilism. The paradoxical rationale of the Sabbetaian believer – the Marrano basis as the psychological explanation of ­Sabbetaianism – contradicted the principle that his inside was as his outside. The contrary was true: the outward belief was the opposite of the inner belief. Everything was upsidedown: the outward act was not genuine, and the genuine article was hidden and duplicitous towards the world: the sacred became profane, and the profane sacred. To express this, the Sabbetaians made their own use of the talmudic saying, “The violation of the Torah is now its true fulfilment”.85 With their sense of paradox and their insistence that “the contrary is true”, they delighted in proclaiming the sanctity of sin, a known phenomenon in the history of religious sects. In radical Sabbetaiaism, one again finds the psychological affinity between an extreme intellectual climate and the growth of nihilistic theories. It is in this context that one must understand the concepts Torah of briah and Torah of atzilut.86 The Sabbetaians believed that the spiritual cosmos was made up of the four worlds of spirituality, creation, formation, and action. The Torah of briah is the Torah before the redemption, and the Torah of atzilut, which finally replaces the Torah of briah, is the true Torah, which is hidden during the exile and is revealed with the beginning of redemption. This marked the emergence of the new, radical type of Sabbetaian who proposed a new morality. As a result of this belief, in nihilistic Sabbetaianism there was a reversal of the normative significance of the concepts of good and evil. There were now various expressions of an ardent desire for a new kind of sanctity that would be characterized by a wild Dionysianism of transgressions, impulses, temptations, and lawlessness. It was precisely from these depths, it was believed, that redemption would come: sin would disappear, and all would be permitted. True freedom was the cancelation of all laws. The common denominator of all these nihilistic interpretations of “redemption through sin” was the sanctification of transgression, a turning of the tables in which the evil was said to be good, and the good, evil. It was a nihilistic sect whose members were people of spiritual quality, Übermenschen in the Nietzschean sense, who preached a theology beyond good and evil. One sees the inner logic of the shift from the annulment of the Torah di-bria to revolutionary dreams. This move had repercussions in the ethical, political, and territorial spheres and in the sphere of leadership. The emptying of the objective world of its contents and values focused the efforts of the nihilists on the religious rather than the political dimension, and some time had to pass before the radical religious moves had political consequences, as for instance in the French Revolution. There developed a new territorialist approach in which the traditional relationship to the ancestral land was changed: the desire to concentrate the Jewish

Zarathustra or Messiah?  175 people in the land of Israel was abandoned, and in its place, there was a demand for territorial autonomy in Poland.87 In the shift, the hagiography was fashioned – directly and not allusively – in the image of the leader.

The “myth-leader” Sabbetai Sevi and Jacob Frank are both covered by the term “myth-leader”. It refers to a myth, the subject of which is a leader in politics, religion, or society who personifies a certain narrative and is associated with sanctity, dramatic symbols and rituals, or an ideological system with an educational significance. Ideologies or religions marked by political mobilization or a continuous pedagogic ethos, by socialization or by rousing the masses tend to make use of a “mythleader”.88 Thus, Bolshevism used Lenin, National Socialism used Hitler, Fascism used Mussolini, Gaullism used De Gaulle, and Peronism used Peron. Similarly, Buddhism used Buddha, Christianity used Jesus, and Islam used Muhammed. Nietzsche called for a transvaluation of values in life and in history, and a change in the relationship between them. Hence his division of history into the categories of monumental, antiquarian, and critical. Each was needed in an equal measure, and each in its proper proportion. In monumental history Nietzsche put supra-historical figures of outstanding intelligence who enhance life and are like torches on mountaintops. Scholem had no particular liking for monumental history, and in a spirit of negation focused on the failed messianism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that placed its trust in “myth-leaders”. In modern Jewish nationalism – Zionism – there were two major Jewish leaders who according to Scholem embodied the messianic idea in their personalities: Rabbi Abraham Kook and David Ben-Gurion. Both were responsible – each in his time and in his own sphere – for shifting Messianism from the domain of the future and the ideal towards an eventual nationalization of the messianic idea. Scholem thought that the Zionist enterprise did not aim to solve the Jewish question on the Messianic or meta-historical level. Zionism, unlike Messianism, did not claim that we live at the end of history. Ahad Ha-Am and Herzl, who were nonMessianic, did not operate on the metaphysical plane but sought to act within the historical process. Scholem considered “the beginning of redemption” – a phrase coined by a leading figure of the generation, Rabbi Abraham Kook – to be a “dangerous formula”.89 Scholem said that Rabbi Kook, whom he saw as “the example and model of a great Jewish mystic”, wrote “an obscure and strange book”, Orot Ha-kodesh (Lights for Holiness). In the three volumes, rather than “thoughts, there was a poetic effusion [.  .  .] and, behind all this, a deep mystical turbulence”.90 Rabbi Kook expressed mystical experience in human language, and understood the secularity of the Jews in Eretz-Israel as part of the process of setting up a modern nation. The halutzim (pioneers) transgressed the prohibitions of the Torah, but as the agents of Jewish nationhood they preserved Jewish continuity. In a lecture to the intellectual circle at Kibbutz Oranim in 1975, Scholem said that the greatness of Rabbi Kook lay in his perception of the holiness of the profane, and his weakness was his “mixture of the Messianic element with Zionism

176  The resurrection of myth [. . .] He created a confusion of concepts by authorizing a mixture of the ideal of building a society and state with contemporary Messianism”. However, “the person mainly responsible” for this “was, of course, Ben-Gurion”.91 Yet, at the same time, although Scholem recoiled from connecting the Messianic idea with actual history, his comprehensive investigation of the subject, the discussion it gave rise to and his dominant personality provoked a Messianic discourse.92 Only from this point of view were Scholem and Ben-Gurion on the same side. Despite their warnings against mixing theology and politics, the thorough investigation of the Messianic vision, its language and accomplishments had consequences for the public and academic discourse on the subject. In founding the state, Ben-Gurion had made the most significant attempt at nationalizing the Jewish Messianic concept. Zionism was a historical experiment in nationalizing religious concepts and metamorphosing them into the secular sphere. Ben-Gurion brought the matter to its ultimate conclusion in his attempt to nationalize the Bible and Messianism. In his works, Scholem makes a methodical distinction between mythical time and historical time. Messianism functions in mythical time and Zionism functions in historical time and has restored to the modern Jews their sovereignty and their total responsibility for their fate. The interplay of mythical-messianic time and real historical time underlies Jewish history. Gush Emunim overturned the historical basis that Zionism rested on by inserting the mythical into history and the metaphysical into the real. One can also sense Scholem’s scientific approach in his warning to the Zionist movement against messianic expectations. In this connection, David Biale, the author of Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and ­Counter-History, asked Scholem in 1980 if Messianism was still a Zionist enterprise. Scholem answered, “Today we have the Gush Emunim, which is definitely a Messianic group. They use biblical verses for political purposes. Whenever Messianism is introduced into politics, it becomes a very dangerous business. It can only lead to disaster”.93 If Rabbi Kook’s cult of the “myth-leader” was embodied in Gush Emunim, Scholem saw in Ben-Gurion a cult of the “myth-leader” that was embodied in the Canaanites: Ben-Gurion encouraged the Canaanites because he skipped directly to the Bible and rejected all exile. But he leapt into the moral Bible, while they turned to the pagan Bible. Ben-Gurion has today forgotten the fact that he alienated himself. He thought than that we were returning to a Biblical historical continuity. But such a continuity exists only in books, and not in history. The continuity of the Biblical period existed within a religious reality and within an historical reality. Ben-Gurion encouraged movements towards cutting off their ties with Judaism here in Israel. But it is impossible to strike roots right into the Bible.94 And indeed, Ben-Gurion sought to place the land rather than the religion, the country rather than Judaism, at the heart of his new interpretation of the Bible.

Zarathustra or Messiah?  177 He compared the deeds of the Israel Defense Forces to Joshua’s conquest of the country, he saw archeology as taking the place of the Talmud, he preferred Berdichevsky to Ahad Ha-Am, and the “denial of the exile” bridged the distance between the original “Hebrew” individual and the new one. Though Scholem distinguished between Ben-Gurion’s “traditional Bible” and the “idolatrous Bible” of the Canaanites, he felt that Ben-Gurion’s rupture of the living connection with the heritage of the generations was educational murder, and in this respect he described himself as an out-and-out anti-Canaanite.95 Although he considered atheism a valid possibility and the Canaanite and secular interpretation of Jewish history was legitimate, he felt that the Canaanite outlook had no true basis: if the Canaanites had been victorious, they would have created a small sect and not a new Hebrew people. Their victory would have canceled out the dialectic between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora and caused a complete polarization with the Jews and an assimilation in the “Semitic space”. Scholem’s expressions with regard to the Canaanites – this “new people, this sect of Jews” – seem to apply to Christianity, which cut itself off from historical Judaism, rather than to Sabbataianism, which in Scholem’s historiographical outlook was a legitimate dialectical link in the chain leading to the modernization of Judaism.96 The State of Israel was also part of this historical continuity, unlike the Canaanites, who wished to establish a new national identity based on a historical leap whose roots were in Israel 2,000 years before. In addition to his criticism of Ben-Gurion’s Canaanite tendencies, Scholem criticized him for his indulgence in Messianic rhetoric: Messianism exists here only as a figure of speech. It was used a great deal by Ben-Gurion, who was responsible for this figurative use of Messianism. He made endless use of this figure of speech, which he understood in a totally secular way, as if he were a true believer [. . .] He used the term “Messianism” no less than the people of the religious camp, who perhaps really believed in “the beginning of redemption”.97 If the Messianism was rhetorical, Sabbetaianism was the concretization of the idea, the process whereby the idea passed from the sphere of speech to the sphere of action, from metaphorical Messianism to actual Messianism. Scholem feared the Sabbetaian dynamic as manifested in three Zionist syntheses in the land of Israel: the Messianic-pioneering synthesis of Rabbi Kook, the Messianic-State synthesis of Ben-Gurion, and the Messianic-Canaanite synthesis of Gush Emunim. The Canaanite Messianism marked the moment when the 13 principles of Judaism were replaced with the sanctification of the land or state, when the symbol became a reality and the idea became a fetish. In the correspondence between Scholem and Ben-Gurion when the latter reached the age of 80, the two of them discussed the place of leaders in history, the “monumental history” à la Nietzsche. Due to the importance of what they said, it is quoted here for the first time.

178  The resurrection of myth On the 24th of October 1966, Scholem wrote to Ben-Gurion as follows: Dear Mr. Ben-Gurion, I have recently come back from a long journey which took me for two weeks to Rumania and East Germany, and I  lost track of news from Israel. When I returned I found I had missed an excellent opportunity, which greater men than I undoubtedly made use of, to express my feelings of respect and give my blessings, late though they are, on the occasion of your eightieth birthday. Finally, I count it among my forgotten privileges that fifty years ago there was published anonymously a German translation of the Yizkor book that two expatriates from Po’alei Zion had published at that time in New York in Yiddish, and which my friend Zalman Rubashov persuaded me to translate. And thus I resorted to pardes [the four methods of biblical interpretation] and I dealt with the secrets of others, and you meanwhile have entered history, and historians of the future will be occupied with you and with discovering your secret for several generations, but the time is not yet right for that. But should one deal with this at all? Our dear friend Dinur is eager to examine the secret of the great historical figures of our time, but I have only dealt with failed Messiahs, and you have two great points in your favor: you are not a Messiah and you have not failed. You have left us a heritage to confront, and people like me who did not take your path can also appreciate the heritage you have left and the audacity of spirit that have made you a mover and shaker in our world. I have not come to trouble you with a verbal outpouring, but I could not do otherwise than to tell you that I wish you to be blessed to the age of a hundred and twenty. With my heartfelt wishes, Yours, Gershom Scholem98 One should notice the phrase “you are not a Messiah”, in this letter. Scholem was hinting here at his distinction between Messianism, which acts outside history, and Zionism, which works within history. As Ben-Gurion represented Zionism, in Scholem’s view he was not messianic. One undoubtedly sees here a certain sarcasm on the part of Scholem towards Ben-Gurion, as the latter claimed that Zionism was a Messianism. One has to remember that five years earlier, Scholem and the intellectuals of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem had expressed a fear of the dangerous combination of a lofty and compelling idea like Messianism and the political authority of a leader like Ben-Gurion;99 they foresaw the dangers inherent in a Messianism of State joined to political power. They witnessed the Kibia operation of 1953 and the colonialist adventure of 1956; some apprehensively followed the nuclear project that was coming into being far from the eyes of the crowd; they perceived the increasing strength of the industrial-military linkage in Israel; they observed the younger generation of politicians who surrounded Ben-Gurion, the “old man” casting angry looks at the Minister of Defense, Lavon, who was seen as really

Zarathustra or Messiah?  179 representing the civilian sector; they saw the launching of the “Shavit” rocket at the height of an election campaign. All these facts were visible to Scholem and the intellectuals who were not at all close to the army. It is against this background that the vicissitudes of the “Lavon affair” may be understood. Ben-Gurion replied to Scholem’s letter of the 26th of October as follows: Haifa, 2.11.1966 My dear friend Gershon Scholem, I was very happy to receive your letter, and especially to make the discovery, which was new to me, that you were the man who translated the Yizkor. You are a unique authority in the hidden and esoteric subject, not understood by me, that you deal with, and I, for all these years, ever since the appearance of your great book Sabbetai Sevi, have hoped for a sequel, for nobody commands this subject – a farrago of nonsense and lofty ideas – as you do. As for the “secret of the great men of history”, in my opinion there is no secret and there are no great men. History is made by many people, if not masses. I do not claim to be a teacher of history, but I have a good knowledge of our undertaking in this country in the first ninety or ninety-five years  – Karl Netter, Yoel Moshe Salomon, Yehoshua Stampfer and scores of friends of theirs (and I know quite a lot about those scores of friends) and their successors up to the Second Aliyah, and hundreds of figures of the Second and Third Aliyah, and especially the youth that stood bravely in the face of the Arab armies  – those who created the “miracle”, if there are any miracles in history. Only the collective enterprise of generations could engineer the renewal of the State of Israel, and only if this collective enterprise continues for many, many more years will it be possible to achieve rest and a legacy. At the present time, rest is far from us, and our security situation grows worse from year to year, and the legacy is very small – not precisely in area, but in quality and in the number of people involved. But one should not despair. That is the lesson I have learnt from the history of our people. And when will we nevertheless have a sequel to the life of Sabbetai Sevi? Respectfully, D. Ben-Gurion100 Ben-Gurion denied the existence of any “secret of the great men of history” or the fact that he in person embodied a breakthrough in history. Despite his claim that it is the masses who are the makers of history, it is clear that personification makes things easier for the followers of a religion or ideology (and sometimes, as in the case of the Sabbetaians and Frankists, replaces it), enhances its mythical content and increases its effectiveness. In Judaism, however, unlike in Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, there is no one mythical figure without whom the religion would lack its essential story and its justification.101 Both Moses and Jesus served as “myth-leaders”, and their biographies were constructed retroactively in accordance with the requirements of ideology or

180  The resurrection of myth religion, but in contrast with Moses and Judaism, Christianity does not exist without the biography of Jesus. The central figure of the founder of the Jewish people does not appear in the story of the exodus from Egypt. In Judaism, the figure of the patriarch Abraham is presented as the founding father. Unlike Judaism, which was able to forgo the biography of Moses in the story of the exodus from Egypt, Christianity does not exist without Jesus and his crucifixion. What happened to Jesus in his life and death is what gives meaning to the Christian in every generation; his crucifixion is what makes the Christian, and without the belief in the crucifixion Christianity does not exist. In other word, unlike in Judaism, in Christianity the mythical figure occupies center stage. The Sabbetaian movement wanted to change Judaism’s negative attitude to the “myth-leader” and to replace it with a different theological approach that drew its legitimacy from a figure of flesh and blood, the alpha and omega of the sectarian religion. The figure  of Sabbetai Sevi became “entirely mythical: gradually the element of historical truth was diminished until nothing was left but a legendary hero who had inaugurated a new epoch of world history”, wrote Scholem.102 His figure of Sabbetai Sevi underwent a process of mythicization similar to that which happened to Jesus. In hagiographical works, he became a divine incarnation like Jesus, an incarnation that transformed him from a superior person into a God. Perhaps the heretical process that overtook Jesus, who became a God, also applied to Sabbetai Sevi: the Messiah that was killed became a converted Messiah. In many respects, Sabbetai Sevi and Jacob Frank were opposites. One was a manicdepressive Torah scholar who did not exceed the limits of rabbinic Jewish normality, and the other, Frank, born in 1726, a hundred years after Sevi, was an ignorant boor who made an ideology out of his primitiveness and, not content with being the leader of a sect, crowned himself a man-God, bold and ruthless, plebeian, and cruel, a sort of Russian mujik who became a living Christ. Frank inherited the nihilistic legacy of Sabbetai Sevi but greatly surpassed his predecessor. This man, described as corrupt, a scoundrel, possessor of satanic powers, almost certainly a trickster and degenerate, was also a man looked upon by his followers as a new Sabbetai Sevi and a God incarnate.103 The last step into the abyss was made by this true nihilist. His personality and deeds were the ultimate expression of a whole myth of religious nihilism. Not only did Frank create a dialectical religious myth, but he was chiefly responsible for creating a myth out of himself. He was lacking in intellectual ability and a critical sense, but the trouble was that it was precisely the lack of these qualities, and, as against this, his skill in painting a picture, in symbolic imagination and conceptual depiction, that served to enhance the image of a “myth-leader” that he formed around himself.

The Frankist syndrome: nihilism and the will to power The “Frankist syndrome” was outstanding in its dual character: the sanctification of destruction plus a hymn of praise to militarism. Their juxtaposition created a nihilist antinomianism on the one hand and iron discipline and military order on

Zarathustra or Messiah?  181 the other, not as opposites but as the two sides of the Frankist coin. The new type of Jew envisaged by the Frankists was no longer a teacher and expositor but a fighter and military man. The renewal of the Jewish people, they believed, would not take place within the walls of the house of study but on the battlefield, for the Jews, the descendants of David, ought not to learn Torah but the use of arms: in the near future, said Frank, every 6-year-old child will be trained in the tactics of war, and in this way we will get an army of ten million men chosen from among the Jews, and thus the children of Israel will become an army.104 The conquest of this world requires one to learn the art of war and military strategy, not in an allegorical sense but as an urgent personal need. The aim was to create an armed, belligerent, productive and independent community that would rule through its own resources over a defined geographical area. After 1772, when Jacob Frank fled from a fortress on the Polish-Prussian border, he ran a sect in Czechoslovakia for more than ten years in a quasi-military framework, trained and decked out in uniforms. When he stayed in the palace at Offenbach from 1787 onwards, he, his bodyguard, and 70 other people were “dressed in red” like soldiers. In his many wanderings and with an excellent instinct for survival, he learned the art of nihilistic subversion, called for political rebellion, advocated the downfall of the Church, and indoctrinated all and sundry with the idea of revolt in all its forms. His call to take up arms and preserve an iron military discipline, looking neither right nor left, also had a feminist angle: “You will live by the sword – even the resurrection of the dead will take place through the sword, and it would be good if even the women carried swords”.105 Here nihilistic and militaristic elements could no longer be separated. Frankist Sabbetaianism brought Sabbatian nihilism to such a pitch of perfection that it canceled itself out. In Frank’s gnostic teaching, the level (world) was created by an evil female power that gave birth to death. The good deity has “worlds” revealed only to “believers” in which there dwells the “king of kings” who is the “great brother”. The evil power was created by three elements in the world embodied in mankind by life, riches, and death, which block the way to the good deity. The good deity, connected to the knowledge of the wise, is not revealed because “the world is subject to inappropriate laws”. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that the existing system of laws has to be repealed. It was for this purpose that Moses, Jesus and Sabbetai Sevi were sent into the world. As even they did not succeed, only one effective path remained: the path of nihilism.106 Life would be restored to its plenitude by the annulment of all laws and religions and by following the leader to the end. It is interesting to compare the views of Nietzsche and Scholem (or his antihero, Frank) on nihilism. Here we have to make a methodological observation and say that the figure of Nietzsche, as Albert Camus put it, “With him nihilism becomes conscious for the first time [. . .]. He recognized nihilism for what it was and examined it like a clinical fact”.107 Opposite Nietzsche, the dissector of modern nihilism, stands Frank, the leader of a sect who preached a religious nihilism, not an expositor but a subverter who went to the limit.

182  The resurrection of myth Gershom Scholem described the mystical nihilism and disharmonious universe of Jacob Frank’s school of thought: Utterly free, fettered by no law or authority, this “Life” never ceases to produce forms and to destroy what it has produced. It is the anarchic promiscuity of all living things. Into this bubbling cauldron, this continuum of destruction, the mystic plunges. To him it is the ultimate human experience. For Frank, anarchic destruction represented all the Luciferian radiance, all the positive tones and overtones, of the word “Life”. The nihilistic mystic descends into the abyss in which the freedom of living things is born; he passes through all the embodiments and forms that come his way, committing himself to none; and not content with rejecting and abrogating all values and laws, he tramples them underfoot and desecrates them, in order to attain the exilir of Life.108 And as in the Frankist universe so well described by Scholem, in the Nietzschean universe delineated in The Will to Power, there is infinite negativity without structure and consequently without stability, purpose, truth, value, or any other meaning: And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world; a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather a force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flow of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord. [WP, 1067] Scholem, like Benjamin (and following Nietzsche) looked at many narratives in Judaism and chose those that went against the grain. The significance of the episodes of Sabbetai Sevi and Frank was contrary to the meta-narrative of rabbinical Judaism. Frank’s nihilistic theology enthroned destruction and praised annihilation: “Wherever I  set foot all will be destroyed, for I  came into this world only to destroy and to annihilate. But what I build will last forever”.109 Next to destruction there was construction, but it was construction understood in a way that was

Zarathustra or Messiah?  183 arbitrary, rigid and not open to question. There was no meaning either to destruction or to construction: “All the warriors must be without religion”. Frank declared that “we are all now under the obligation to enter the abyss”,110 a path that was impenetrable and full of obstacles. In order to do this one had to employ a tactic of non-speech: a “burden of silence”. If one wants to capture a fortress, one does not do it by talking but by the use of military force: “The place that we are going to tolerates no laws, for all that comes from the side of Death, whereas we are bound for life”.111 Law is contradictory to life: law establishes norms and restrictions, life is abundant and unrestrained; law is static, life is dynamic. The “red path” or “the way of Esau”, the way of the abyss, takes one to this point. After one “comes to Esau”, the positive edifice will be revealed which at present is a Torah of atzilut, the laws of which have not yet been made known. This was not a regular theology made up of beliefs, commandments, and prohibitions, but an anti-Torah gnostic myth of the second century CE. Not only was the spirit and way of thinking the same in the gnostics, the first nihilists, and the Sabbetaians and Frankists, the later nihilists, but the terminology was almost identical. The gnostics and Sabbetaians used biblical concepts and completely changed their meaning. They saw Esau and Bilaam as servants of the good God; the snake in the Garden of Eden was almost a symbol of redemption; “Divine Wisdom” in both religious movements compels man, bound in the shackles of the “alien God”, to destroy all laws. Common to both is the idea that the good God requires an ethics beyond good and evil.112 The anarchistic utopia in Frank’s Sefer Divrei HaAdon (The Collection of the Words of the Lord) is steeped in a vitalist ethos: “Only for this I  came to Poland: to annul all religions and customs, and my ambition is to bring life to the world”.113 In his article, “The Sabbetaian Movement in Poland”, Scholem stressed the basic motif of the rejection of everything – all values, doctrines, religions, and laws – for the sake of “a liberation of life”. The rejection of the existing order runs like a thread through Frank’s teachings, but it is a means to a direct penetration of the essence of life, of its center. “Life” is the very heart of the nihilist revolution. A primal lawlessness and an unruly primitiveness are the warp and weft of an egotistic pathos that touches the depths of the soul. Life must not be restricted: one must promote, on the contrary, an upsurge of life, organic life, free from the atmosphere of exilic Judaism. Although Isaac Luria did not create a demiurge, an evil power responsible for the creation, his disciples went further than him, creating a kingdom of absolute evil, totally alienated from divinity.114 Scholem thought that this resemblance to Sabbetaianism was accidental and unintentional in view of the fact that these gnostic ideas were alien to Judaism. The rapid dissemination of the Lurian Kabbala brought about a politicization, the emergence of the Messianic movement of the seventeenth-century, which was a national revival in a religious form. In “Redemption Through Sin”, Scholem described the rationale of the heretic. Is it not logical to suppose that the coming of the Messiah makes the Torah redundant? The laws of the Torah were given for the period of exile, a period that was about to end. Distorted gnostic ideas began

184  The resurrection of myth to spread among Jewish believers. For a long time, the world had been ruled by a false God, and humans were subservient to this imitation that had been created especially to keep men in subjection. The true God of Israel would reveal himself, repeal the false laws and redeem his followers. “The gnostic model was distorted”, said Scholem, but there was a bold spirit behind it and it released tremendous energies – a desire to relinquish exile and renew the nation. The followers’ disappointment at the Messiah’s conversion could have led to a condition of cultural despair. How short a distance there is from a religion of hope to a radical religion of despair!115 The followers had to justify their Messianic beliefs after the Messiah had betrayed them, and therefore sought a hidden meaning in their hero’s conduct. On investigation, Scholem found that there were many anusim among the followers, and so the idea that the Messiah was clad in a Marrano garment, broke the sacred laws and was to be found together with sin did not come out of the blue. The Messiah would not come until the entire kingdom was sunk in sin and transgression; redemption would be found in the most sinful place. Scholem understood the theosophical significance of the antinomian faith. Man lives in two realities: internal and external. Every Jew is henceforth a Marrano. The true believer has to subject himself to the false Torah; the Kabbala revealed the true, secret Torah, and hence the false Torah has to be rejected. Perhaps Scholem was drawn to antinomian thought and showed intellectual courage where others saw “mystical nonsense”. As a traditional Jew, however, he was far from approving the nihilistic praxis of the Sabbetaian heresy. Nietzsche and Freud had a similar task: they too wanted to expose the dark side of the Enlightenment by revealing the hidden aspect of human nature. Scholem remained ambivalent about the Sabbetaians: he admired them but at the same time condemned their heresy.116 His great enthusiasm for the religious heretics who laid a path to modernity, secularity, and nationhood was connected to the roots of his national outlook, for the utopian, even Messianic idea seeks political concretization. The more messianic or utopian the idea, the more its realization will be achieved through radical concepts of total revolution – “a Sorelian myth”, as it were. It seems that Henry Pachter thought that Scholem believed that the cultural myth of the Messiah could be immediately translated into politics without an intermediate period of political activity. He provided the myth but failed to provide the political tools. He seriously speculated about the chances of the Sabbetaian movement succeeding. His political naivety which had brought him to the “Brit Shalom” confused Messianic hopes with an actual movement, a cultural ideal with a political outlook. In the name of Messianism, the greatest idea in Judaism, Scholem, Pachter tells us, invites us to celebrate a nihilistic revolution. However, it could be argued that Scholem was not so politically naïve in view of his opposition to the First World War, for instance. In the period between the two World Wars, the outstanding figures in the study of the history of religions were Rudolf Otto and Gerardus van der Leew, among the older historians, and Mircia Eliade and Henry Corbin, among the younger ones. According to Steven Wasserstrom, author of Religion After Religion, the works of these scholars were characterized by a Nietzschean scheme of reference,

Zarathustra or Messiah?  185 the investigation of extreme religious phenomena and a comprehensive approach to their subject.117 Scholem, who already had the reputation of being the most eminent scholar of Judaism in the twentieth century, belonged to this tradition and took part in the meetings of the Eranos circle which were held under the inspiration of Carl Gustav Jung. His lectures in Ascona (where the circle met), like “Religious Authority and Mysticism” (1957) and “Nihilism as a Religious Phenomenon” (1974), were not intended as Jewish dissertations but as studies in the general history of religion. When Scholem visited Paris in 1927, four years after he immigrated to Palestine, Scholem met Walter Benjamin. In his book The Story of a Friendship, Scholem wrote, “Benjamin was the first person I  told about a very surprising discovery I  had made: Sabbetaian theology  – that is, a Messianic antinomianism that had developed within Judaism in strictly Jewish concepts”.118 The two friends discussed the burning question, “What in fact is Judaism?” Was Judaism still a heritage, or was it an experience, or an object of scientific investigation? Scholem aimed at that time at achieving a comprehensive science and total theory of religion, and in this connection, it is an interesting fact that in 1931 Benjamin searched in Paris for a certain book on Sabbetai Sevi that Scholem had asked for. The historian Jeffrey Mehlman suggests that the subject of “false Messiahs” had come up at their meeting in Paris, a meeting that became a turning-point in Scholem’s investigations.119 Are we to infer from this that the thesis of “Redemption Through Sin” came out of the intellectual climate between the two World Wars and not out of the libraries of Mount Scopus in Jerusalem? Benjamin was present at Pierre Klossowsky’s lecture at the Collège de Sociologie in Paris in 1939 entitled “The Marquis de Sade and the Revolution”.120 It was evident from the lecture that Klossowsky had a deep knowledge of the work of Eliade and Corbin. As I pointed out, Scholem linked Frank to the French Revolution by relating the fortunes of the Frankists until they supported the ideas of the Enlightenment and the achievements of the French Revolution.121 Klossowsky summed up De Sade’s logic as follows: The evil must erupt once and for all; the bad seed has to flourish so that the mind can tear it out and consume it. In a word, evil must be made to prevail once and for all in the world so that it will destroy itself and so Sade’s mind can find peace. Klossowsky thought that the old mental structures of gnosticism made a reappearance in the spirit of this great “liberator” of the Enlightenment. Analogously, Scholem explained that Frankist logic demanded that evil must be taken to the end. The contradictions of the Sabbetaian world were in keeping with an antimonian outlook. Just as the devil was the most interesting character in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Frank was the anti-hero of “Redemption Through Sin”. In Frank’s perception, anarchic destruction represented Luciferian splendor, all the positive, tremendous associations of the word “life”. Scholem’s interest in Frank was part of a broader European phenomenon of the 1930s.

186  The resurrection of myth Post-Durkheim sociology, which had its beginnings in Paris in the 1930s, existed outside the ivory tower of the academic world and placed its emphasis on sociologie sacrée (sacred sociology), an alternative sociology of religion. The key concept in the alternative school was “sin”, a concept that had reverberations at that time, especially due to Georges Bataille, who, like Scholem, was a friend of Benjamin’s.122 Roger Caillois, founder of the Collège de Sociologie and Bataille’s associate, author of Man and the Sacred and Scholem’s Parisian publisher, investigated the role of sin and transgression in festivals and came to the conclusion that when masks appear, it is a sign that laws are annulled.123 Norms become perversion and perversion becomes law; the laws to protect public order are systematically broken and all is permitted. Caillois wrote his doctoral dissertation under the guidance of the well-known scholar of myths Georges Dumézil, from whom he derived his ideas about festivals. Denis Rougemont, a member of the college and writer of the book La part du diable (The Devil’s Share), was much preoccupied with the reversal of moral norms, the lapse of law, human sacrifice, and collective desires, with special emphasis on exceptional situations, situations of siege or of grace.124 Festivals were seen in Parisian intellectual circles as rituals and carnivals. The carnival, also associated with the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, was regarded as a situation of reversals in which boundaries, prohibitions and status are erased.125 Ritual as a repeated act grows into myth with the collapse of accepted norms. In this way, it was possible for the antinomian historians of religion to turn dead rituals into living myths. The sociologie sacrée perceived that, beyond the time of the festival, the ideal human prototypes were perverted by philosophical anthropology: the holy man became the man of sin; the respected national leader became a cult; the heretic,126 an ideal; and the rationalmonotheistic morality became an anti-rational amorality. The Eranos circle, of which, as we said, Scholem was a senior member, was an academic laboratory in which ritual-as-myth was examined. Scholem was not exceptional in his symbolization of extreme actions and his modernization of myth. The investigations of religion by Scholem and his friends were not the only examples of cultural Sabbetaianism at that period. The idea of defeating evil from within was exemplified by Carl Schmitt, the leading jurist of the Third Reich, for example. When he came before the de-Nazification tribunal, he declared, “I swallowed the Nazi virus, but it didn’t affect me”.127 Sin was seen as the most effective means of bringing about redemption. In the writings of Nathan of Gaza, radical paradox was sanctified as the basis of the Sabbetaian theology, and thus contradiction became the beginning and end of Sabbetaianism. To use Karl Popper’s terminology, the Nietzschean (and Frankist) method could not be refuted because the validity of the refutation itself was questioned. Nietzsche claimed, “It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable” (JGB 18). It was not the dynamic reality with its contrasts and contrary tendencies, but reason which could not bear an inner contradiction. Frank was the figure that in Scholem’s opinion most fully exemplified this living paradox, combining as he did a “mystical theory of revolution” with a “rare authenticity” and embodying a vision of “anarchical liberty”.128 This ideal of mystical

Zarathustra or Messiah?  187 revolutionism went beyond the requirements of Lurian Messianism which sought the redemption of the nitzotzot (sparks) and the liberation of the Jewish people before the end of the exile. Direct experience without the mediation of an external authority was the cornerstone of the Frankist anarchism. Life henceforth would not be conducted according to the laws of the past; the unique would become the universal; what was forbidden was now permitted; suffering would take on flesh and blood and become life. Scholem, said Eric Jacobson, saw Frank in the image of Mikhail Bakunin and the revolutions of 1848.129 The destructive character of the revolt of the “springtime of the peoples” was in keeping with the logic of dialectic destruction of Bakunin, who thought that revolution could only arise out of the overthrow of the structures of the past. Bakunin saw destruction as a creative act: “There cannot be a revolution without acts of destruction deriving from instinct; this is a redemptive and fruitful destruction, a destruction creative of new worlds to which it gives the breath of life”.130 In the same way, Frank advocated a constructive destruction, and Scholem explained that “the time for building had not yet come. The drawing-power of destruction, an original and authentic anarchism, prevailed over all aspects of life”.131 The anarchical idea is supported here by the religious desire to be freed from law, all desire that had a nihilistic content years before Bakunin. In Frank’s mystical concept, “the vision of nihilistic redemption”, the real crux was the destruction of the system of laws of this world. Frankism, according to Scholem, was the destruction of everything in Judaism, total self-destruction, which he called “the nothingness of religion” or “the untheological”.132 For the Sabbetaian anarchists, the meaning of the immanent revolution was total destruction. They freed themselves from Messianic expectations, expectations that had continued for many generations, but their disappointment had the ironic result that the great expectations of redemption via the Messiah ended with conversion to another religion. Moreover, this step gave the Messianic idea a different character: instead of recoiling from it, it was felt that one should cling to it through the practice of “contradictory action”. This is how the dual reality of the inner and outer life began. Like other revolutionary movements, Sabbetaianism sought to infuse a new vitality into the post-revolutionary world, but the meaning given to these new rituals and revolutionary orderings of life was liable to destroy the known Jewish structures. Scholem was afraid of the nihilistic implications of a revolutionary new idea, knowing that the anarchistic instinct lying deep within each one of us could finally destroy Judaism. In the past, traditional Judaism had repressed this manifestation, but when it was allowed to emerge, its appearance was particularly violent. Like all other religions, Judaism provided alternative paths for the heretical elements that grew out of the inner paradox that exists in every religion: the creation and destruction of religious institutions and organizations. One example of such an element is the mysticism that sets a question mark over the authority of religious institutions. As long as religious tradition exists, religion has to provide ways of escaping from itself. When the Messianic impetus was unable to find a place within the Jewish ghetto, it broke out in its destructive Frankist form: Messianism became nihilism.133

188  The resurrection of myth The destruction of the ghetto was thus at the heart of the Frankist vision. The Frankist policy of destroying all Jewish values among Polish Jewry ended in an encounter with a parallel policy in which the non-Jewish world rejected the Frankist project. Both worlds shut their doors to the Frankists: rabbinic Judaism on the one hand and Islam and Christianity on the other. This isolation gave the nihilistic impetus no choice but to turn inwards to the world of the ghetto, with the result that religious nihilism found anchorage in shattering the foundations of Jewish religious life. Scholem explained that “because the means to political action were closed off to him, Frank focused instead on a moral revolt against the dominant world order”.134 The nihilistic impetus did not so much aim its blows at the institution itself as it sought to destroy the basis of law that was the source of power of the tradition that was challenged. The Messianic impetus overthrew the entire system of law by stating its opposite: for example, the Sabbetaians changed the meaning of matir asurim from an expression meaning “frees the captives” to a commandment permitting the forbidden. Underlying Scholem’s analysis is the idea that the more rabbinic Judaism repressed the Messianic principle, the more the destructive nihilistic element sprang up and developed. Scholem and Benjamin both attacked the concept of progress, the product of Enlightenment philosophy, one from the starting-point of Sabbetaian scholarship and the other from the point of view of his research on the arcades of Paris and his theories of history. Jeffrey Mehlman pointed out that Georges Sorel, the writer of Les Illusions du progrès (The Illusions of Progress) (1908) was the source of Benjamin’s arguments against the belief in progress.135 And indeed, Sorel’s philosophy of history rebelled against the Enlightenment’s illusions of progress not only as a class phenomenon but as a state of mind. As against the linear approach to history which saw a positive correlation between progress in time and moral and intellectual improvement, and as against the regressive religious approaches to history which saw a negative correlation between progress in time and a lost paradise, one had the cyclical view of history. From the ancient Greeks to Nietzsche and the existentialists, this approach waged a war against the idea of any purpose. Sorel believed that in the historical process there was a balance between constructive and destructive factors in which the task of renewal can accrue to various forces.136 In drawing his analogy between the Sabbetaians and the anarchists and nihilists, Scholem found they had a similar public image: In the eighteenth century, to be called a Sabbetaian was to all intents and purposes equivalent, so far as the effect on ordinary public opinion was concerned, to being termed an anarchist or a nihilist in the second half of the nineteenth.137 In addition to Sorel, Benjamin saw Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) as the revolutionary and thinker most closely identified with undermining the concept of progress. Blanqui preceded Nietzsche (certainly not with the same degree of philosophical talent) in the development of a special concept of time, in which progress is an illusion.138 Scholem’s discovery of a similar intellectual world,

Zarathustra or Messiah?  189 which assailed the concept of progress, did not leave him indifferent. It was in keeping with the Nietzschean state of mind opposed to the ideology cultivated by the bourgeoisie, but it also aroused in him latent thoughts about cyclical time, tendencies later developed in ideas about restorative utopias.

Nihilism as a modern phenomenon In a study-day devoted to a discussion of norms and values, Scholem chose to speak of the reversal of values and their devaluation to the point where they disappeared. In his article “Nihilism as a Religious Phenomenon” published in 1974, based on a lecture he gave to the Eranos Circle, he claimed that nihilism was umbilically connected to Nietzsche: Ever since Nietzsche, in his Will to Power, called for nihilism, the most mysterious guest to knock on our doors, this guest has sat on our table, and instead of being removed, he rules over us!139 In “Nihilism as a Religious Phenomenon”, Scholem made a comprehensive survey of nihilism and drew up its genealogy. Nihilism, in his opinion, was a term that changed its meaning in different historical and philosophical contexts. In the immediate post-war years Scholem changed his concept of nihilism from a political theology that favored destruction, a position that was widespread in the German intellectual climate in the period between the two World Wars (it was shared by Carl Schmitt and to some degree by Walter Benjamin), to a more moderate concept, “quiet nihilism”. This could be understood as a nihilism of an anarchical kind. The first sign of nihilism’s retreat from the political field was in a discussion that Scholem had with his brother Werner in 1914, a time when the concept signified his opposition to the war as against the social democrats who supported it. The meaning of nihilism at that time was abstaining from involvement in politics and a search for a new political idea. Unlike Benjamin, Scholem looked for a new dimension in which abstract nihilism could find a political anchor, and he found it in the context of Zionism. Arthur Danto’s basic premise was that Nietzsche’s “nihilism [. . .] is not an ideology, but metaphysics”.140 Danto distinguished between Nietzsche’s “metaphysical” nihilism (“reality itself has neither name nor form”) and the “St. Petersburg style of nihilism”: that is, a nihilism which rejects and destroys a whole series of religious, moral, and political principles. Nietzsche’s nihilism was not a functional nihilism but an immanent nihilism. Metaphysical nihilism is confined to the here-and-now or to put it in Ofelia Schutte’s words: “Nietzsche would like to see the metaphysician rooted in the earth”.141 Its meaning is not the rejection of the significance of the universe, and not “eternal recurrence” as found in the Stoics and Ecclesiastes, but a horrified, yet courageous glance at a universe without a purpose. Schopenhauer, Wagner, and the young Nietzsche all had the romantic commitment to immediacy and action without the mediation of the emasculating rational

190  The resurrection of myth concepts, sought a unity of poetry and philosophy, and saw objective truth as a form of coercion. They rebelled against reason’s pretension of knowing reality as it is, because, in their view, reason was utilitarian, partial, and a falsification of reality. The world could be redeemed only by an art which was intuitive, total, and spontaneous. Schopenhauer turned to philosophy and Wagner to music. Nietzsche, for his part, adopted an approach that was as total as possible: he was a philologist, a poet, a philosopher, a historian of a sort, and also a cultural critic who touched on nearly all aspects of human life, and for that reason his influence on twentieth-century European civilization was decisive. Nietzsche thus used history as a starting-point for a reorientation of philosophy, which had established itself as a philosophy of deceit: in his radical investigation and in the genealogy of his fundamental concepts, man had discovered that the idols that he himself had created – God, morality, reason, truth – were revealed as a broken reed and as a golem that turned on its maker.142 Nietzsche was the genealogist of human history who revealed the naked values as he saw them: as superstructures, narcotic drugs, or energy pills that gave taste and purpose to a world that had no taste or purpose. Nietzsche looked at nihilism as it was and diagnosed history in its nakedness. Historical man discovered that his God was an image which man had created with his own hands out of self-protection, reason was  deceptive and a falsification of the evidence of the senses, morality, all in all, was institutionalized habit, and objective truth was not possible. Historical man was naked, a leaf tossed in the wind. Disillusioned with theology and disappointed with progress, he was suddenly conscious of the gaping chasm which threatened to swallow everything up. Nihilism lay at the door! Modernity was seen in the disillusionment with progress and the appearance of nihilism.143 In the Europe of the First World War and the following years, Scholem for the first time reflected in his diary, in letters, and in conversations with his friends on the anarchistic and nihilistic significance of the events of the day, and particularly of the Great War and the Bolshevik revolution. He thought that the nihilism of the war and the revolution could only be overcome through a redemption. In a letter to the writer Werner Kraft, he wrote, The difference in my position to war and revolution is quite clear: although I do not take part in either, with the former, I distance myself, yet with the later, I observe. I bring this revolution, which without a doubt has historical legitimacy, into my visual horizon – not more but also not less. As long as the spiritual position of the new order of things is not completely impaired, it is my obligation not to abandon a “well-meaning neutrality”. For while the revolution, in which my participation would be important, is the theocratic revolution, which surely is not identical with this one (however much this revolution naturally has something messianic about it). I cannot do anything more.144 When he reached Palestine, Scholem abandoned his preoccupation with the Messianic aspect of the war and the revolution in Europe in favor of the study of

Zarathustra or Messiah?  191 Kabbala and involvement in the new problems presented by the Middle East. In the initial years of his immigration, there was a change in his understanding of the terms “anarchism” and “nihilism”, and he gave them a new meaning. One should remember that in Europe, the starting-point was a distinction between “anarchism” and “nihilism”. Anarchism, as seen by its founders, was a search for a harmonious world whose peace had been shattered by a handful of corrupt politicians and capitalists. Propaganda through action – that is, terror exercised by a minority that seized control of power and property – would restore the original order. Nihilism was quite the opposite. According to this concept, the world had been broken up and disharmonious from the beginning, a sort of orderless order, and one had continually to work to keep it that way. The change that took place in the Zionist context, expressed in Scholem’s article “Redemption Through Sin”, was that these concepts now became violent and self-destructive forces, energies that gave rise to an apocalyptic Messianism infinitely far removed from the secular-universalist Messianism associated with the idea of progress of the Enlightenment. Destruction-for-destruction’s-sake was seen in Sabbetaian Messianism as the explanation for the apostasy of Sabbetai Sevi and his followers. In his late article, “Nihilism as a Religious Phenomenon”, Scholem portrayed the nihilist in a different way from that he had done previously. The nihilist was now seen as a Russian revolutionary: “a permanent opponent of any kind of authority, who cannot accept principles or beliefs unconnected with the intention underlying the principles”.145 The nihilist was now a modern rebel who rejected the contradictions of Russian feudal and pre-capitalist life, and consequently became a self-creator beyond social norms. Nihilism, said Scholem in 1974 in reference to Nietzsche, waits at the doors of bourgeois society, ready to expose hypocrisy. “The anarchists”, he continued, actively incorporated this idea [nihilism] in their propaganda and were the classic representatives of nihilism in the eyes of other groups. Before Nietzsche  – far beyond the limits of politics and related to the collapse of authoritarian value-systems – nihilism was known as a guest waiting to enter our celebration.146 This statement of Scholem’s echoes Nietzsche’s declaration that “Nihilism stands at the door” (WM I 1). Nietzsche explained its appearance by the internal logic of European history until that time, by the cultural development of Europe with its Christian morality.147 The questioning of the moral explanation of the world in the modern period undermined the foundations of the Christian edifice.148 Secularization opened up a chasm, seeing that until then Christian morality had served as a bulwark against nihilism by endowing man with a definite value in the face of the fortuitous nature of the forces of creation and destruction.149 Morality gave a purpose to the cosmos and a meaning to man. But now, it is reasonable to ask, what was the significance of nihilism as a counter-movement, or, to be more exact, as a movement acting against itself? The answer is: “The highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “why”? finds no answers” (WM I 2).

192  The resurrection of myth Morality served as a tool for the continuation of existence and prevented one from gazing into the depths of nothingness, but it also contained the truths that worked against it: the fiction was revealed as an illusion, and the golem turned on its creator. Every phenomenon that Nietzsche examined – religion, morality, alienation, decadence – contained the seeds of its own ruin and destroyed itself.150 Already, Friedrich H. Jacobi thought in 1799 that nihilism is an extreme idealism that denies the existence of any independent reality. The nihilist is a skeptic whose reason leads him to doubt the existence of independent entities such as external phenomena, other consciousnesses, God or even himself.151 Jacobi described him as a man who lives in a world “whose source is nothingness, which aspires to nothingness, for nothing and with nothing”.152 In saying that the nihilist denied the existence of all beings and, consequently, the existence of all values, Jacobi gave this concept its modern meaning, which was eventually to be developed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Max Stirner. If all beings – God, the soul, the world  – are rejected, all pseudo-beings such as values must be rejected at the same time. Romanticism made nihilism into an aesthetic definition. The deification of the self or the absolute “I” were seen as a device to annihilate the sphere of God. The subject occurs in Friedrich Hegel’s early work Faith and Knowledge (1802), in which he said that “the first object of philosophy is to recognize absolute nothingness”,153 a claim that Fichte developed a little further. The first German romantics made a poeticization of Fichte’s ideas, and thus at the end of the eighteenth century, the idea of the total creativity of the absolute self became dominant. Romantics like Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, however, used the concept of nihilism to condemn the arbitrariness and artificiality of romantic poetry.154 In the nineteenth century, nihilism was identified with a critique of the social and political consequences of atheism. The thinker most closely identified with the metaphysical significance of this concept, apart from Nietzsche, of course, is Arthur Schopenhauer. His work, The World as Will and Idea (1819), showed that his radical idealism was not only the nihilistic Western counterpart of the Buddhist “nirvana” but that his nihilism was an autonomous position at the heart of Western culture.155 Schopenhauer’s ideas greatly influenced the thinking of the young Nietzsche, and Richard Wagner’s operas, such as The Ring of the Nibelungs, which he began to write in 1848, were based on primitive, Nordic, and pre-Christian myth; thus, nihilism also overtook the gods. The repressive mechanisms of government authority, said Scholem, did not give the late nineteenth-century Russian nihilists much choice. The only path open to them was total destruction. The use of the word “nihilism” only began with its employment by a few members of the radical Russian intelligentsia on the appearance of Ivan Turgenev’s great novel Fathers and Sons in 1861. “Nihilism” was ascribed to those who denied all authority or concepts, whether religious beliefs or moral ideas, political theories, or social outlooks, unless proved by reason or confirmed by their usefulness to society. The nihilist rejected all that was based on tradition, authority or value-judgments. Bazarov, the central character in Turgenev’s novel, resembled his historical counterparts Dimitri I. Pisarev, Nikolai

Zarathustra or Messiah?  193 Chernichevski, Nikolai A. Dobrolyubov, and Vissarion G. Belinsky in their faith in reason, progress, and science; in their strong desire to see changes in contemporary society; and in the affirmation of the materialist philosophy.156 The “nihilists” considered themselves materialists because of their rejection of spiritual manifestations such as God or the immortality of the soul. They claimed that their belief in progress authorized sweeping away “the rubbish of history”; this idea led directly to the anarchists’ sanction of the use of bombs when words were insufficient. The Russian nihilist was not an unbeliever who denied all principles but a radical positivist who wished to break away from religion and to liberate the people through scientific values. The nihilists were not wild revolutionaries, although the concept was adopted by anarchists like Sergei Nechayev and the terrorists of the “People’s Will” organization, the assassins of Czar Nicholas II. The nihilists contributed to the radicalization of the consciousness of the Russian intelligentsia, but they should not be confused with the anarchists. Scholem thought that the anarchists saw the affinity between nihilism and revolutionary change as quite natural: rebuilding required the overthrow of the entire former structure. Thus, the younger generation absorbed nihilism as “the destruction of all institutions with the intention of revealing the positive concealed beneath the ruins”.157 Behind these words was Bakunin’s famous declaration that destruction is a positive act. Kropotkin’s statement about the nihilistic impulse in anarchism, said Scholem, was also based on the fact that both movements were committed to “a continual struggle against the despotic and hypocritical institutions in order to gain freedom for the individual and the free association of independent communities”.158 According to Scholem, the change in the concept of nihilism from a secular revolt to a political theology was in keeping with the shift of philosophical nihilistic movements towards action: “The decline of old authoritarian and religious value-systems still based on revelation was considered a result of the collapse of the religious universe connected with critical philosophical movements which were nihilistic”.159 In his article on nihilism, Scholem distinguished between “quiet nihilism” and the “nihilism of action”. “Quiet nihilism” implies that “institutions and reality itself must be negated or destroyed not through active opposition but through reflection and metaphysical means”.160 One can see that “quiet nihilism” is non-involvement in this-worldly matters, while the other nihilism is a “nihilism of action”, a part of an active and radical historical movement that can revolutionize the world. Its guiding principle is that transgressing the Torah is truly to reveal it (“the annulment of the Torah is its observance”). This nihilism according to Scholem was the essence of the Sabbetaian dialectic. Hans Jonas, Leo Strauss, and Hans Blumenberg, who belonged to the same philosophical school as Scholem and whose thinking also reflected a confrontation with Nietzschean nihilism, disapproved of Scholem’s Frankist model and his “Nietzschean moods”.161 Nietzsche recognized two kinds of nihilism: “active” nihilism and “passive” or “weary” nihilism. “Nihilism. It is ambiguous: A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism. B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism” (WM, I  22). Active nihilism is a

194  The resurrection of myth manifestation of strength, in that it is a force that destroys alienated ideals and questions the validity of normative values. “It reaches its maximum of relative strength as a violent force of destruction” (WP, I 23). “Weary” nihilism, like Buddhism, is a manifestation of weakness, a force that is self-destructive: “Attempts to escape nihilism without revaluating our values so far” (WM, I 28). It is a nihilism that does not fulfill its function. The release from religious faith and the alienation from Christian morality led to the uprooting of man from his world, while he continued to search for a point of support outside himself. For Nietzsche, the history of nihilism was the shape of the future: “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism” (WM Preface III). Nietzsche explained the coming of nihilism by the internal logic of European history until that time, by the cultural development of Europe with its Christian morality. The questioning of the moral explanation of the world in the modern period undermined the foundations of the Christian edifice. Secularization opened up a chasm, seeing that until then Christian morality had served as a bulwark against nihilism. But now, it is reasonable to ask, what was the significance of nihilism as a countermovement, or, to be more exact, as a movement acting against itself? The answer is: “The highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; why? finds no answers” (WM I 2). Morality served as a tool for the continuation of existence and prevented one from gazing into the depths of nothingness, but it also contained the truths which worked against it: the fiction was revealed as an illusion and the golem turned on its creator. Nihilism, as philosophical skepticism, as a religious phenomenon and as a political message, attracted the young Scholem. In 1937, the year he wrote his “nihilistic” article, “Redemption Through Sin”, Scholem mentioned in a letter to Zalman Schocken his desire “to proceed on the fine line between religion and nihilism”.162 But he had no intention of falling into the abyss like Frank, the chief character of his essay, for he knew that nihilism was not only a form of dissatisfaction with the world, but its ultimate aim was to destroy it. Two of his acquaintances sought to warn him against this phenomenon: Leo Strauss warned him against the possibility of “identifying nihilism with philosophy ”,163 and Baruch Kurzweil pointed out the dangers of dabbling in demonology and the temptations of nihilism.164 Nihilism, for both Nietzsche and Scholem, was an immanent position, a sort of permanent parting of the ways where a man could break his limbs, fall into total nothingness, suicide, skepticism, and degeneracy, but, beyond this, he can function once more and effect a transvaluation of values. Benjamin Lazier suggested paying attention to two parallel paths taken by Scholem. One was the passage from his stormy youth in Berlin to his bourgeois life in Jerusalem, from the refusal of the young Gerhardt to accept the world to the more mature and relaxed outlook of Gershom. This change was paralleled by his Zionist development from the self-overcoming of a Jew in exile whose philosophical ideal was Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to a more complex Jewish identity, which also drew inspiration from the heretics he studied and researched. The second path offered for investigation was the transition from nihilism to nothingness.165

Zarathustra or Messiah?  195 Scholem revealed the nihilistic rejection of the world in the thought of modern thinkers, and even in his own thought, but he felt this gnostic tendency to be facile and dangerous. He therefore found an escape-route. The representation of God in the world was to be found in the process of life itself, a special form of nothingness. This gave one a dual result that was really one: God is absent but also present. This result is neo-gnostic, but without an acceptance of its definitive implications: viewing the world as filled with God’s nothingness means unconditionally affirming the world, which is in opposition to those who deny it. In Nietzschean terms, this is amor fati, accepting the world unconditionally without seeking a significance. Nietzsche said that one had to deny any significance to the process itself and to divest it of any sense of direction, either positive or negative [WP, 55]. Plato also denied that being possessed significance or purpose, but he conferred these qualities on the eternal world of ideas. Spinozan pantheism, which identified the world with God, also denied that the world had a purpose, but “logical necessity” bestowed on being a divine significance. Plato and Spinoza took values from being and gave them to something else: Platonic ideas or logical necessity. In contrast to these, Nietzsche proclaimed a total nihilism based on eternal recurrence: “This is the most extreme form of nihilism: the nothing (the ‘meaningless’), eternity” (WM 55). Among other interpretations of Nietzsche’s nihilism, one can draw the following conclusion from his positive philosophy: beyond nihilism, there is doubt that denies everything or freedom that affirms everything. It is precisely the meaninglessness of recurrent existence which gives affirmation to destiny. Nietzsche “saw himself as a phenomenon of fate rather than as a wish to be other than he was”. Spinoza’s “love of God” (amor dei) gave way to the Nietzschean “love of fate” (amor fati).166 Instead of subservience to an external and abstract entity, there was a great love of existence, of life-as-it-is. Schopenhauerian passivity was rejected by Nietzsche because it conferred a value-status on reality, just as the Buddhist approach that rejected existence was also denied.167 Both approaches were contrary to the Nietzschean principle that one had to adapt oneself to the rhythm of the dynamic reality. Nietzsche affirmed the Heraclitean approach that led to an acceptance of reality-as-it-was without turning one’s back to it. The various ­projections – the religious and political churches, science, philosophy, the state – all sought, according to Nietzsche, to make cosmetic improvements to reality. The affirmation of reality as it is without preconditions and without any pretension to reason, purpose, or significance, was the Nietzschean response to the recognition of the true situation and to liberation from the veils of illusion. Nietzsche’s nihilism is all-inclusive when it comes to the rejection of objective values. Nihilism is the rejection of all that deserves to be rejected, and this rejection paves the way for the affirmation and strengthening of the will to power. The rejection of an existence of pseudo-values led Nietzsche to a classification of men according to their strength and not according to their values. In 1975, a year after the publication of “Nihilism as a Religious Phenomenon”, a correspondence began between Gershom Scholem and Ernst Jünger in

196  The resurrection of myth connection with Werner Scholem, Gershom’s brother, who went to school with Jünger.168 The First World War was a parting of the ways for Gershom Scholem and Ernst Jünger. The former was a pacifistic Jewish youth taking his first steps in Germany in the fields of Judaism and Zionism who was eventually to become one of the greatest scholars of Judaism in the twentieth century, and the latter was a German romantic, two years older than Scholem, who sought a life of danger and adventure, welcomed the war, and eventually became one of the leading modern German writers. Nietzsche’s works exerted their magnetism on both these young people. Scholem wanted to be “the Zarathustra of the Jews”, and Jünger sought Zarathustra in the trenches and succeeded in dragging him there. Scholem foresaw the horrors of the war, which in his opinion represented the negative climax of modernity, and evaded service in the war of the German bourgeoisie on the pretext of mental illness; Jünger, enthusiastic about the existential and technical possibilities of the first total war, volunteered to serve, was wounded in battle and received the highest decoration for bravery. Scholem abandoned his German homeland and immigrated to Palestine with the intention of re-establishing Jewish sovereignty there, whereas Jünger was an officer of the Wehrmacht in the Nazi army of occupation in Paris. In 1975, their paths crossed in a correspondence consisting of 11 letters whose subject was Werner Scholem, Gerschom’s communist brother and Jünger’s classmate. Apart from this circumstance, the matter of nihilism – inspired by Nietzsche, the modern philosopher of nihilism – was the main issue in the correspondence of these two thinkers. Unlike many thinkers who betrayed Nietzsche when they took Zarathustra into the trenches, Jünger had a profound understanding of the Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie and a deep love for the progenitor of “the will to power”.169 When Jünger fused his interpretation of Nietzsche with his sense of the aesthetic attraction of the war and the experience of the trenches, he was no longer one more author writing about the war but had become its most enthusiastic advocate. Jünger saw the First World War as the most concrete manifestation of Nietzsche’s existential, aesthetic, and nihilistic vision. He did not look for the most “exalted” moment but for the moment. One cannot prepare oneself for a mystical moment of this kind, for such a moment is like an earthquake that overtakes a man unawares. According to Jünger, the experience of the war was not relative but absolute, enabling a man to discover himself and finally understand the meaning of life. Later, and especially in Der Arbeiter (The Worker), Jünger no longer stressed this spontaneous and existential aspect of the war but rather the total mobilization of a society in which fighting is regarded as a form of work.170 Earlier, however, the war was perceived in his first book, Stahlgewittern, as a sight of overwhelming beauty: a salvo of artillery is described as a “storm of steel”, a shell is a “hurricane of fire”, an airplane dropping bombs is “like a bird of prey” and buildings with their walls and roofs are destroyed “as though by magic”.171 The title, “Storm of Steel”, however, hints at his later approach, which treated technology as a natural phenomenon like a storm. The technological battlefield represents the primal, mythical, irrational forces that lie beyond conventional bourgeois economic or ideological concepts.

Zarathustra or Messiah?  197 The correspondence between Scholem and Jünger began with an initiative of the German writer who wished to know if Scholem was his classmate in Hanover, class of 1914.172 Scholem replied that he was not, and by way of courtesy added that he had read two of Jünger’s books, and continued, Strangely enough, my brother Werner, who was later a delegate to the Reichstag (and who in 1940 was murdered in Buchenwald), lived from the summer of 1913 to the end of 1914 in Hanover, where there was what was then called ‘the press’ to prepare people for matriculation, and he was also active in the social-democratic ‘working youth’ (Arbeiterjugend) [. . .]. You may be the most suitable person to decide whether this was the same Scholem. Like me, [he had] a small, angular Jewish face [. . .]. I too would be very interested to know if you and my late brother were together in the same school.173 On the 20th of April 1975, Jünger answered Scholem that he identified Werner Scholem as a member of his class in the private school “Gildemeister Institut”. “He did not look specially small or thin as you describe him, but unusually ‘grown up’. In particular, his intelligent physiognomy and his sceptical smile contributed to this”.174 In old age, he said, “Images of this kind become more vivid”, and he could easily visualize Werner “still sitting on the school bench next to me”. He described their relationship as “sympathetic-ironic”, and only now, for the first time, was Werner’s political orientation made known to him. And Jünger ended thus: All that remains to me is to commiserate with you. A quarter of a century later, what you tell me about Werner’s end not only saddens me but also surprises me. In the light of the good judgment I believed he possessed, I would have thought that, like other members of your family, he would not have missed the last train out of the country.175 But Werner Scholem did miss the train and became a victim of German Fascism. Walter Benjamin identified the roots of the Fascist mentality in the front-line experiences of the First World War, in the new nationalism, and in modern technology.176 In 1930, he reviewed an anthology entitled War and Warrior (Krieg und Krieger), a collection of eight essays that took its title from Friedrich Georg Jünger, the editor’s brother. All the authors emphasized the experience of the first mechanized war, the republic of the trenches, and the experience of the front, as having shaped their post-war political and social consciousness. Benjamin’s critical review, “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays, War and Warrior”, edited by Ernst Jünger”, originally intended for a radio broadcast, was one of the earliest exemplars of cultural and political criticism to examine the nature and essence of Fascism. Here Benjamin formulated for the first time his well-known view of Fascism as the “aesthetization of politics”, six years before his “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”.177 Benjamin focuses his critique on the method of the authors of Krieg und Krieger, who foster a sense of the war-that-was-lost and relate to it more seriously than to

198  The resurrection of myth the war that actually was. Their war was lost not only in the killing fields, but also, and more significantly, in their conceptualization and idealization of it, totally divorced from its real horrors and bloody course. For them, war – and for them it is always “eternal” war – is the supreme manifestation of the German nation. Their notion that defeat is a uniquely German trait reflects their efforts to convert the German calamity into an inner triumph, into a victory of the ideal, a victory of the will. The war is abstracted of every ethical motive or ideological impulse and is borne aloft by its own power, as the expression of an internal experience. The heroic nihilism that derives from a mythic or spiritual basis has been declared to be an inner triumph that draws its strength from the absolute and independent beauty of “art for art’s sake”. War can be expressed as self-fulfillment, as a “wondrous vision” that is internalized as an experience and not as something comprehensible, in concepts of aesthetics rather than of cognition. The individual, absorbed by and organized into the masses, finds his satisfaction in battles on the symbolic level: this action towards a goal is only metaphorical, because the image of the enemy is unreal. The belligerent act, now an “inner experience” that does not need an enemy, is transferred to the plane of representation and becomes aesthetic.178 The Jüngerian “new man” undoubtedly foreshadowed and paved the way for the man of the SS, and, in fact, said Joyhn Norr, “Jünger’s ‘new man’ was not so different from the Nazi stormtrooper of the period: part ex-serviceman, part delinquent, displaying an attitude of ‘heroic realism’, which meant ‘fighting for its own sake’ ”.179 Stanley Rosen saw a connection between Heidegger’s inner logic in Being and Time and Jünger’s in Der Arbeiter, and their attraction to Nazism. Nihilism and Fascism were linked by an umbilical cord: Jünger is of interest because his career provides us with a series of steps similar to those traversed by Heidegger: at first, an active encouragement of the contemporary nihilistic motives; then, disillusion with the political mobilization of what was supposed to be a spiritual purification; last, [. . .] waiting for new, anti-nihilistic revelations of Being.180 In Rosen’s opinion, the nihilization of Western civilization proceeded in a straight line from Der Arbeiter to Nazism. In 1934, one year after Hitler came to power, a Nazi figure  expressed appreciation of Jünger’s contribution to the outlook of German youth: German youth is first of all indebted to Ernst Jünger for the fact that technology is no longer a problem for us. They have accepted the admirable views about technology expressed in Feuer und Blut; they live in harmony with them. They no longer need an ideology with which to overcome technology. Jünger has liberated us from that nightmare. The “nightmare” in question was the hostility to the automobile, technology, industrialization, and urbanism that characterized völkisch anti-modernism, the cultural despair of Van den Bruck and Spengler’s pessimism.

Zarathustra or Messiah?  199 . Jünger and Werner Scholem stood on opposite sides on almost every political, national, and intellectual question. When the war broke out, the two went their separate ways. Werner chose a communist and pacifist path and Jünger chose a nationalist and militarist path. Jünger wrote to Gershom Scholem as follows: After war was declared, we saw each other for the last time. We canceled our enrollment in the Gildemeister and were dispersed in army camps [. . .]. On that day, I came back from the hairdresser: he saw it, and remarked with a sceptical smile, “Before going into battle, a German youth anoints his hair with oil!”181 The Scholem brothers saw with disgust the German youth of their age running in their thousands to the “Nietzschean adventure”, as the first technological total war was called by one of its participants. Gershom Scholem said it was “mass-murder which is also called a cultural war”.182 Werner refused his father’s demand that he should enlist in the war as a German patriot, but at the same time was not quick to break off contact with him. He finally did enlist in the army and was severely wounded. When released, he participated in uniform in an anti-war demonstration and was consequently accused of betraying the fatherland. His father repudiated his two sons and threw them out of the house. In 1915, Gershom Scholem was expelled from his school after writing a letter condemning the war in which he claimed that the cult of war and Zionism were incompatible. At the same time, Werner the pacifist joined the social-democratic party, and he was later a member of the Communist Party, from which he was expelled in 1926. After frequent imprisonments in 1933, the year the Nazis came to power, Werner fell into the trap that awaited him and was murdered in Buchenwald on the 17th of July 1940. In a letter of the 28th of April  1975 Scholem told Jünger about the circumstances of the trap in which his brother met his tragic death: You are surprised he didn’t leave in time “as other members of your family apparently did”. This was not the case. He was one of the first to be arrested on the night of the burning of the Reichstag. I for my part left for what was then called Palestine already in 1923, and my mother and brother remained in Germany until 1938 and 1939. An understanding of their situation was not one of the strong points of the Jews of Germany. My brother, an extreme socialist, was convinced that as someone who had fought in the First World War, nothing could happen to him. It is difficult to believe this today, but ideas of that kind were very common at that time. Anyone who corresponded with relatives who remained in Germany has a sad tale to tell about it. I wish you all the best. Yours, Gershom Sholem.183

Did myth rise against its maker? In explaining the meaning of the story of the golem, Scholem came to the fascinating conclusion that the Promethean passion is connected to the Nietzschean

200  The resurrection of myth death of God. One of the earliest sources for the golem relates that the prophet Jeremiah conceived of the Sefer Yetzira. Through a kabbalistic process of wordcombination a man was created on whose brow was written the words ‫םיהולא הוהי‬ ‫“( תמא‬the Lord is the true God”),184 but this man erased with a knife the aleph from ‫( תמא‬true), and what remained was ‫( תמ‬dead). The meaning of this was the desecration of the Name, for it now appeared that God was dead. And Scholem, who related this story, concluded, How interesting it is that Nietzsche’s famous cry, “God is dead”, was first heard in a cabbalistic text warning against the creation of a golem and which links the death of God to the realization of the idea of a golem!185 Hermeneutics is a system of midrashic decipherment that allows modern man to reinterpret myth and listen once again in a fresh way to a message from the past.186 Scholem employed hermeneutics to warn his readers against myth rising against its maker, a human golem that rebels against its progenitor, whether the myth is technological, communist, Messianic or Canaanite. Scholem tells us that the golem is the symbol of human destructiveness that grows beyond measure and is liable to destroy the world. When the golem is not restrained by the holy Name and considerations of proper order, it can break out with a blind, destructive force. There have been many changes in the meaning of the concept of the “golem” in the course of history: in Jewish literature, the word first appears in the Book of Psalms. Man, according to Scholem, is an eikon (or, in the biblical parallel, an image) of God. Until he received the divine spark, he was merely a golem. God was able to create man from dust and bestow on him a spark of his being and his sacred wisdom – “in his image, in his likeness”, as it were. It was the starting-point of a famous saying in The Ethics of the Fathers: he (Rabbi Akiba) used to say, Beloved is man, for he was created in the image of God; it is a sign of even greater love that it has been made known to him that he was created in the image, as it is said, “For in the image of God he made man”.187 The view that man was created in the divine image makes God present in man, who is an extension of God. The talmudic tradition took a truly revolutionary step: it claimed not that God is human, but that man is divine. It is precisely in his creative acts that man manifests his full humanity, for the idea of imitatio dei implies an absolute totality. Man wishes to continue the work of God. Here we have a “dual image”: man is created in the image of God and a golem is created in the image of man. Science exemplifies the modern golem that is created through the power of reason. Scholem named the biological and spiritual descendants of the Maharal (Rabbi Yehuda Loew of Prague), famous scientists like Theodor von Kármán, the scholarengineer who applied mathematics to space-flights; John von Neumann, the physicist of quantum mechanics and the game theory in economics; Norbert Wiener,

Zarathustra or Messiah?  201 the mathematician of cybernetics, “who contributed more than anyone else to the magic that has produced the modern golem [. . .]. The golem of Rehovot [the Weizmann Institute, D.O] can well compete with the golem of Prague”.188 Henri Atlan continued Scholem’s line of thought and pointed out, among other things, that magic paved the way for modern science, which seeks to understand the laws of nature, to change and control them.189 Pico della Mirandola, for example, used magic and Kabbala in order to influence the fate of the world by scientific means. The “modernity” of the Renaissance – the intellectualization of magic – was exemplified by Giordano Bruno, the disseminator of Copernicus’s ideas, who was sentenced to death by the Church as Prometheus was chained to the rock by the gods. What the myth of the golem was for Scholem, the myth of Prometheus was for Nietzsche. Oedipus and Prometheus represented for Nietzsche the two faces of Greek myth: Sophocles’ Oedipus symbolized the contradiction in the dialectic of building and destruction, and Aeschylus’s Prometheus symbolized rebellion as a dialectic of sin and suffering. Prometheus who stole fire from the gods was depicted by Nietzsche as man dominating his culture in rebellion against the gods. The sense of justice in Aeschylus’s Prometheus is the casting off of the yoke of heaven that characterizes man-as-an-artist creating life and culture through his own powers. The duality of Aeschylus’s Prometheus, of his Apollonian and Dionysian sides, is represented by the formula: “All that exists is both just and unjust, and is thus justified”. Hegel and Socrates supported this idea: Socrates put order into chaos in a rational framework in order to justify existence; Hegel argued that the rational must be embodied in reality and the real must become rational. Nietzsche objected to this rational tradition, which in his opinion crammed the cosmos into a narrow rational Procrustean bed [BT,9]. The Nietzschean Prometheus was a parting of the ways. Nietzsche disagreed with the progressive philosophy of history and consequently rejected an ideology of redemption. The critique of rational progress on the one hand and the critique of religious regression on the other left Nietzsche with a cyclical and immanent view of history. Nietzsche rejected the metaphysics both of the Church of religion and of the secular church of the Enlightenment. In Nietzsche’s Promethean myth, man wields the fire through his own will and does not receive it from heaven. Prometheus casts off the yoke of heaven: he slowly raises himself and takes control of his culture on his own. The elevation of the individual is bound up with the decline of the gods and proclaims a rebellious belief in man’s creative capacity and is ability to destroy the Olympian gods. The tragic foundation of the Promethean myth is the realization that man acquires the good for himself by means of sin. Punishment is conferred on the human race for its presumption to take off from the ground. The Greek original sin appears as the first philosophical problem and reveals an irresolvable contradiction between man and his desire to be God. This contradiction, according to Nietzsche, is the basis of all culture. The Promethean tension of the sinning and suffering individual lies in his heroic aspiration to totality and his wish to be the sole eternal being. Nietzsche warned of the appearance of a liberated Prometheus who could transform the revolt against authority into a

202  The resurrection of myth new barbarism: “I am pointing to a new phenomenon [. . .] a different sort of savage who comes from above: a natural, conquering and dominating sort, seeking material it can mold. Prometheus was a barbarian of this kind” [WP,900]. By means of a genealogy of concepts, Nietzsche concluded that man had been the creator of light. The God who created light, man and fire did not really exist but was only a metaphor. Nietzsche’s radical explanation was this: through aesthetics that shapes the world man formed his God from the beginning, and he can therefore easily murder him: Was it necessary that Prometheus  – who stole light and was punished for it – had to be imaginary from the beginning so that he would discover retroactively that he himself created light because of his desire for light, and not only man but also God was nothing else than the work of his fashioning hands and matter in his fashioning hands? [GS,300] God has been murdered, but the Übermensch is not yet born. Modern man has been given a nihilistic consciousness: he is homeless, and the question is, where should he now go? The nihilistic critique cleared the way to the will to power, the will-to-independence. This is the modern capacity to create a world in one’s own image without reference to God. The Nietzschean revolution lies in the reflective self-consciousness of the modern individual who creates the world with his own power. Reason is not the pivot of the revolution but aesthetics, not the Judeo-Christian morality but the principle of the will to power, not knowledge but creativity, not quality but existence. The murder of God is the proclamation of the possibility of modern man coming to birth. The developments of the Promethean myth, the tale of the golem, and the modern mythology of Frankenstein and his descendants suggest to us the threatening possibilities of man who creates himself out of the dust of God – modern man who has freed himself from his restraints. In Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1928), created under the inspiration of Gustav Meyrinck’s novel The Golem, the hero of the film and ruler of Metropolis, together with the scientist who works for him, form a robot resembling a woman. Technology, embodied in the woman-robot, which transforms the human and the spiritual into the industrial and the mechanical, becomes a “godlike autonomous power demanding prostration, submission and ritual sacrifice”.190 In the film Blade Runner, made in the 1980s, the director Ridley Scott created robots that had a short life span, but who, as in the kabbalistic legend, turned against their creators and destroyed them. “The golem, instead of being a spiritual experience of man, became a technical servant of man’s needs”, wrote Scholem.191 From being the ideal of speculative thought, science became the will to power. In the tale of the golem, the myth implied that the relationship between the knowledge of nature and the control of nature was ambivalent and contradictory – “the tree of knowledge of good and evil”, as it were. Its meaning was that a knowledge of the structure of the world gives man dominion over it. The tree of knowledge that brings man close to God

Zarathustra or Messiah?  203 achieves the objective of man’s existence as “God’s image”, but the ambiguous fact that the tree of knowledge is also the source of death and destruction has accompanied the experience of knowledge from its gnostic monotheistic sources to the ancient sciences, the Renaissance, and modernity. Human science is the jewel in the crown of the idea of the imitation of God, for “in order for us to know that our knowledge of human nature is correct, we must argue that it permits it to create man”.192 The natural sciences provided inspiration for the social sciences: political science, beginning with modernity and the Enlightenment, sought to create a new man as the supreme achievement and necessary realization of the knowledge of human nature. The “mad father” in Bruno Schulz’s story “Tailors’ Dummies” in The Cinnamon Shops wished to reach “Faustian heights”, or, in the words of Moshe Idel, “We want to create man once again – man in the image of a mannikin”.193 However, unlike this modern man estranged from the divine, the sages of the Middle Ages were audacious and did not fear the theological consequences of man’s creative powers. They aspired to create something that would reflect the human universe by means of a magical life-experience that would achieve spiritual wholeness. The Jewish philosopher André Neher remarked in his book Faust and the Maharal of Prague (1987) on “the basic identity of the structure of the golem and the Faustian soul of modern and postmodern man”.194 Faust represents the covenant with the Devil, and the golem reflects the ambivalence of man’s nature, the ambiguity of the scientist which is the hallmark of modernity. Was this the intention of the thinkers of the Frankfurt school when they revealed the instrumental rationality of modernity? The contemporary parallel with Prometheus is the scientist, the engineer and the technician who create their golems in the laboratory and duplicate them.195 Although science is fashioned by its creators, it is liable to develop a dangerous tendency to overpower its makers and develop destructive characteristics. Jewish tradition in ancient times claimed that the earth has a spirit of its own. The gnostic sources of this tradition point out the danger in making matter into an independent body without restrictions. The question of creating a new man has long ago passed from the esoteric fantasy of magic to the sphere of science that determines fates.196 Here, perhaps, is the secret of the connection that the philosopher Hans Jonas found between his early study of gnosticism and his search for the “ethics of technological civilization”. His conclusion was that “Prometheus undoubtedly freed himself from his chains when science revealed hitherto unsuspected powers”.197

The price of Messianism Scholem’s discussion of the Messianic language owes a debt to Benjamin in the historical context of the period during and after the First World War. The theory of language developed by Benjamin from 1915 onwards is a lament over the devaluation of language, which degenerated from a divine tongue that expressed the essence of things to a functional human language of signs. From being the Word of God, it became a mere nomenclature. These insights were expressed about

204  The resurrection of myth a year later in a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem and were published after Benjamin’s death under the title “On Language in General and On the Language of Man”. Ten years later, Scholem sent his famous letter to Franz Rosenzweig for his 40th birthday, entitling it “On Our Language: A Confession”.198 These were the years of “Brit Shalom”, during which the young Kabbala scholar expressed his fears of “mixing up religious and political concepts. I categorically deny that Zionism is a messianic movement and that it is entitled to use religious terminology to advance its political aims”.199 It was in this intellectual climate that Martin Buber, like Benjamin and Scholem, expressed his dislike of the nationalization of religion and its language. The copying of Messianic language by secular language, he wrote, is “unlikely to be particularly faithful. One cannot transfer the characteristics of Messianic language to nationalist language. Every mixture creates a confusion which is disastrous”.200 Was the secular Messianism – “that apocalyptic path”, as Scholem called it in his letter to Rosenzweig201 – a manifestation of political theology? These shifting interrelationships between the theological and the religious that worried German and French thinkers who studied political theology in the twentieth century, also troubled Jewish humanist scholars of religion like Scholem, Buber, and Akiva Ernst Simon who were close to the theological-political tradition.202 They were concerned that modern society in its secularism had lost all sense of the relationship between the sacred and the profane, between morality, religion, and practical life. Benjamin, for his part, considered the dialectical affinity between the secular, political hope of liberation and the religious and Messianic hope of redemption.203 This ambiguity of a fascination with the sacred and at the same time awareness of the danger of the religious language characterized their intellectual thought and political practice. It is interesting to see that the same discourse of Messianic language and political theology was relevant in Zionist context of Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s.204 These were not abstract questions but issues which addressed the practice of Zionism and the future of the Israeli state. This framework provided the possibility of seeing Zionism as a form of Messianism, whether in its religious version or secular one. Ben-Gurion on the one hand and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook on the other are good examples of different varieties of political theology. In some ways, they were on opposite sides of the fence. The former, a political leader, did not hesitate to appropriate the sacred, to mobilize hallowed myths, and to harness them to the task of building the state; the latter, a religious mentor, did not hesitate to appropriate the profane, to mobilize Zionist pioneers, and to harness them to mystical speculations concerning the coming of the Messiah. Each had an essentially different starting-point from the other, but the common denominator between them was the raising of the profane to the level of the sacred: the plowman became a sacred vessel of Judaism and a central element in the process of redemption. For a short while, there was a kind of meeting between these two opposite outlooks, but from that time onwards, their paths again divided. Rabbi Kook turned towards transcendental Messianism, which relied on the Ruler of the Universe, and Ben-Gurion turned towards Promethean Messianism, which relied

Zarathustra or Messiah?  205 on the sovereignty of man. In both cases, there was a definite fusion between the world of the sacred and the world of the profane, and both men had a clear political theology, but Ben-Gurion was the most extreme expression of secular Messianism and worked for a politicization of the theological, while Rabbi Kook was the most extreme expression of religious Messianism and worked for a theologization of politics. Only in his final years did Scholem clearly say that he objected to the positions of both the rabbi and the statesman.205 The translation of “Redemption through Sin” into English triggered many comments that drew an analogy between Sabbetaianism and Communism, or, more specifically, between Sabbetaianism and Stalinism. At the time when the essay was written, the antinomistic reasoning, the false Messianism and the “Frankist syndrome” of totalitarian nihilism were depicted as a common denominator between the two movements. Norman Podhoretz gave a good description of this in his journal Commentary in 1971: In the 1930’s, when “The Holiness of Sin” was first published, Scholem produced the most illuminating analysis anyone had yet done of the Stalinist mentality, and was responding to such shocks as the massacre of the kulaks, the Moscow trials, the purges, and the Hitler-Stalin pact. Scholem, of course, made no explicit comparisons himself and was almost certainly not thinking consciously of Stalinism at all. Nevertheless, a reader of “The Holiness of Sin” in 1937 would have had to be very narrowly focused indeed in his thinking to miss the breathtaking similarities between the kinds of arguments the Sabbataians used in denying that the conversion of Sabbati Zevi to Islam proved that he was not after all the messiah of the Jews, and the arguments employed by the Stalinists in trying to persuade themselves against all the evidence of the senses that a socialist revolution was in fact being fulfilled in the Soviet Union under Stalin.206 Irving Howe, the cultural critic, joined Podhoretz’s American conservative camp when in an interview with Scholem in 1980 he admitted that he could not avoid making the contemporary analogy when reading “Redemption through Sin”. He asked Scholem about “some similarities here to certain totalitarian movements” and, specifically, “in the Stalinist view of ethics, is there not a parallel to the Sabbatian outlook?”207 Despite Howe’s skepticism towards the use of analogies between religious Messianism and political radicalism, he said, “I cannot totally reject them. Certainly, one can learn from your Sabbatian studies how dangerous, indeed, fatal, it is to mix apocalyptic visions with political energies”. Scholem replied, When I wrote this essay, which was the first that got me a reputation beyond scholarship, I was not aware of what you say. But I was made aware by later developments. Remember I wrote it in 1936. It was published early in 1937 in Palestine. Later I was made aware of it when it appeared in Commentary with a preface saying we have seen this in Stalinism – which was true. But I was

206  The resurrection of myth only made aware of this through what happened in the forties and fifties. It is obvious that there is a strong parallel between the dangers of apocalyptic Messianism and the dangers of apocalypse in secularist disguise.208 On another occasion, Scholem was asked explicitly, “Do you see Communism as a Messianic movement?”209 The metaphysician Scholem, a theologian in the eyes of many, who believed in the ability of ideas to change history, maintained that Marxist economic analysis was alien to him and that his spiritual world-view clashed with those of his Communist brother, Werner, and his best friend Benjamin, who was a Marxist, and thought that Socialism has a messianic pretension and is a kind of secular Messianism. Scholem answered, Many young people took Communism as a substitute for messianism. There have been times, places, and circumstances in which many people- not only Jewish youth, to whom this certainly applies- saw messianic dimension in communism. The zeal with which they threw themselves into it had some of the enthusiasm of the messianists to it. And this is where the whole thing collapsed. Messianism is really a very big and complex matter, not at all simple. I’ve written about this twice in my books. I’ve defined what I thought was the price the Jewish people has paid for Messianism. A very high price. Some people have wrongly taken this to mean that I am an anti-messianist. I have a strong inclination toward it. I have not given up on it. But it may be that my writings have spurred people to say that I am a Jew who rejects the messianic idea because the price was too high.210 Scholem claimed that the failure to distinguish between Messianism and secular movements becomes a destructive phenomenon, and, like Talmon, he saw the Messianic idea as the source of the destructiveness. He told his friend Walter Benjamin of his attraction to “the positive and noble force of destruction” and declared that “destruction is a form of redemption”.211 This was not very different from the “nihilist-totalitarian syndrome” marked by the ambivalence of the desire to destroy together with the desire for construction. On two occasions, Scholem dwelt on this price of Messianism: in his introduction to his monumental work Sabbatai Sevi (1957) and in the programmatic essay, “The Messianic Idea in Judaism” (1971). In the introduction to his biography of the seventeenth-century Jewish Messiah, Scholem wrote, This book, however, was not written as a treatise on theology but as a contribution to an understanding of the history of the Jewish people. Insofar as theology is discussed – and a great deal of theology, for that matter – it is done in pursuit of historical insight. A movement which shook the House of Israel to its very foundations and has revealed not only the vitality of the Jewish people but also the deep, dangerous, and destructive dialectics inherent in the messianic idea cannot be understood without considering questions that reach down to fundamentals. I admit that in such discussions much depends

Zarathustra or Messiah?  207 on the basic outlook of the historian with regard to what he considers the constitutive elements of the historical process. Perhaps it is permissible at this point to say, with all due caution, that Jewish historiography has generally chosen to ignore the fact that the Jewish people have paid a very high price for the messianic idea. If this book may be regarded as a small contribution to considering a big question: What price messianism? – a question which touches upon the very essence of our being and survival – then I hope that any reader who studies it from this point of view will obtain some reward. Anyone who can appreciate the gravity of this problem will also understand why I have refrained from expressing opinions or drawing conclusions with respect to any contemporary issues bound to arise out of the subject matter with which this hook deals.212 As well as praise, Sabbatai Sevi drew criticism from various quarters. The most famous example was that of the Orthodox literary critic Baruch Kurtzweil, who discerned in Scholem “a tendency to a positive view of mythical and irrational factors” and thought that he showed “a certain sympathy for phenomena which are in fact a highly dangerous resurrection of nihilistic myths and irrational, metaethical principles”.213 The historian of religions Zvi Werblowsky also said about Scholem that the accusation of “dogmatism” is a two-edged sword. If it is relatively easy to show that the orthodox or rationalist view distorted history, it is just as easy to show – or at any rate, to wonder – whether there is not some distortion in the new, revolutionary view.214 In both his reaction to these criticisms and in the development of his ideas on the subject, in 1972, Scholem continued to speak of the price of Messianism: What I have in mind is the price demanded by Messianism, the price which the Jewish people has to pay out of its own substance for this idea which it handed over to the world. The magnitude of the Messianic idea corresponds to the endless powerlessness in Jewish history during all the centuries of exile, when it was unprepared to come forward onto the plane of world history. [. . .] There is something grand about living in hope, but at the same time there is something profoundly unreal about it. It diminishes the singular worth of the individual, and he can never fulfill himself, because the incompleteness of his endeavors eliminates precisely what constitutes its highest value. Thus in Judaism the Messianic idea has compelled a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished. [. . .] Jewish so-called Existenz possesses a tension that never finds true release; it never burns itself out. And when in our history it does discharge, then it is foolishly decried (or, one might say, unmasked) as “pseudo-Messianism”. The blazing landscape of redemption (as if it were a point of focus) has concentrated in itself the historical outlook of Judaism.

208  The resurrection of myth Little wonder that overtones of Messianism have accompanied the modern Jewish readiness for irrevocable action in the concrete realm, when it set out on the utopian return to Zion. It is a readiness which no longer allows itself to be fed on hopes. Born out of the horror and destruction that was Jewish history in our generation, it is bound to history itself and not to meta-history; it has not given itself up totally to Messianism. Whether or not Jewish history will be able to endure this entry into the concrete realm without perishing in the crisis of the Messianic claim which has virtually been conjured up – that is the question which out of his great and dangerous past the Jew of this age poses to his present and to his future.215 Scholem thought that the Zionist enterprise did not aim to solve the Jewish question on the Messianic or meta-historical level. Zionism, unlike Messianism, did not claim that we live at the end of history. Ahad Ha-Am and Herzl, who were non-Messianic, did not operate on the metaphysical plane but sought to act within the historical process. In Scholem’s opinion, the failure of Messianism in the seventeenth-century invalidated the idea of a figure  of flesh and blood. Ben-Gurion’s Messianism was directed towards the State of Israel, whereas the Messianism of Gush Emunim focused on the Land of Israel. When interviewed by Irving Howe, Scholem expressed his fears of “the extremists in Gush Emunim”, who “use religious sanctions in order to justify their activities in the territories. There is nothing more contemptible or harmful than the use of religious sanctions in a conflict between nations”.216 Scholem shared J. L. Talmon’s fears that the phenomenon could lead to a religious war. He warned that if Zionism blurred the boundaries between the religious-Messianic plane and the political-historical plane, it would be liable to cancel out the significance of the Jews’ entry into modern history. He said that action in the political arena of secular history and action in the spiritual-religious arena are like two parallel lines that should never meet: “It would be disastrous to mix them”.217 At the same time, the mystical aspect of Zionism is not necessarily identical with the Messianic aspect: it represents a renewal of spirit within history and not a situation that only comes about at the end of history. In a lecture he gave in 1973 in the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, Scholem spoke of the importance of theological concepts in a secular form. He explained that although concepts like creation, revelation, and redemption were legitimate, they lacked the explosive charge they formerly possessed. “Yet, the messianic idea has maintained precisely this vehemence. Despite all attenuations, it has proved itself an idea of highest effectiveness and relevance – even in its secularized forms”.218 This, of course, was a late echo of Scholem’s letter to Rosenzweig in 1926 in which he warned that the sacred tongue was “brimful of explosive material”. According to Scholem, the Messianic language could only be divested of the explosive charge that threatened to blow it up if the Jewish tradition of a constant tension, none of whose elements was neglected, was preserved. In this tradition, there were attractions and tensions between different trends and currents. There

Zarathustra or Messiah?  209 was the tension between apocalyptic trends and trends that worked against them; the tension between restorative trends that sought to revive an ancient glory and utopian trends; the tension between sober and realistic Messianic trends, such as that of Maimonides and apocalyptic or extreme utopian trends; the tension between a movement towards redemption as a process within history and ­a-historical trends, including the redemption of nature as in the Kabbala of Isaac Luria; and, recently, the tension between secular or revolutionary Messianic trends, such as those of Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, and liberalism. In all these trends, the conflict was not resolved or mitigated, and this also applied to the mutual relationship of Messianism and Zionism. The young Scholem’s “structural search”, to use Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept, was fulfilled in secular Zionism. History was not a mere accumulation of events but a structure, a non-human a priori mechanism that directs and controls events and their inner logic. It was a morphological form, as Oswald Spengler would have said, or, as Carl Schmitt put it in Political Romanticism (1919), “The idea of an arbitrary power over history is the real revolutionary idea”.219 Unlike these two German thinkers who affirmed impersonal structures, Scholem adopted a “structuralist explanation” but, at the same time, undermined it. He formulated the Sabbataian code of “Messianism through sin” and “redemption through destruction” but he also warned of the price of Messianism. These two contrasting approaches to the Messianic idea, empathy, and criticism, remained with him throughout his life. Although he rejected a positive Messianic yearning, as a scholarly sublimation or an explanatory obsession it never left him. The Messianic yearning and its various metamorphoses, whether as a philosophy of history or as a “structuralist explanation”, eventually needed a narrative, a detailed historical description. Jean-François Lyotard explained that all forms of legitimacy are connected with the telling of a story or a narrative presentation.220 The narratives that bestow this legitimacy provide significance and content. All activity or reflection claiming authenticity requires legitimacy in the form of a narrative, and the more complex and universal the activity is, the more the legitimacy is strengthened. The meta-narratives of modernity, such as that of secular Messianism, are philosophical statements about the meaning of history. While the great religions offered a transcendental solution via a metaphysical explanation beyond the physical world, the secular religions offered a meta-­ narrative of contemporary politics via the modern ideologies. It was not the transcendental theology of the religions but a political theology of modern life.221 Unlike Carl Schmitt, in whom there was a correlation between the understanding of this structure, the political theology, and the will to enforce it at the beginning of the twentieth century, Scholem made a distinction between them and resolved to understand, but not to accept. His historiographical starting-point was the Sabbataian apostasy, which resulted in the overthrow of systems, the modernization of the Jews and the Zionist phenomenon.222 Scholem was a committed and critical intellectual who did not wish to throw out the Zionist baby with the bathwater. Although he was critical towards the movement to which he saw himself as belonging. The subject of Messianism was

210  The resurrection of myth close to his heart because it was his way of revealing conceptual and historical dialectics. He recoiled from a Messianic determinism imposed on history. Scholem’s biography and academic work can only be understood as a revolt against the ­liberal-bourgeois ethos on which he was nurtured as a youth in Weimar Germany. Scholem’s fear of a fusion of Messianism and history not only existed in the Jewish context but also in a world context. He identified communism (and also Fascism) not only as a Messianic political religion but also as a kind of psychological manifestation: people need myths to follow.223 In the course of his investigations, Scholem discovered the danger inherent in the Messianic myth and showed his scholarly interest in the Messianic phenomenon, in its historical dialectic, and in the price to be paid for it. But not everyone was of this opinion. Baruch Kurzweil was the greatest critic of Scholem in nearly all academic and political matters. As a religious man he was unable to accept Scholem’s political theology based on his heretical-religious reading of the nihilistic manifestations of Sabbetai Zevi and Jacob Frank. Ascribing Scholem’s academic treatment of these phenomena to an attempt to fill the void left by the decline of religious faith, Kurzweil claimed that Scholem’s “nihilistic mysticism” was a product of the Nietzschean school of thought.

Notes 1 Gershom Scholem, Lamentations of Youth – The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913– 1919, ed. and trans. Anthony David Skinner, Cambridge, MA 2007, 42. 2 J. Chytry, The Aesthetic State – A Quest in Modern German Thought, Berkeley, 1989. 3 Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte, Cambridge, MA 1987. 4 Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 47. 5 Ibid. 6 Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, Berkeley 1994, 71–83. 7 Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 43. 8 Ibid., 42. 9 Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 47. 10 Ibid. For a new reading of Scholem, including a religious one, see Daniel Weidner, “Reading Gershom Scholem”, The Jewish Quarterly Review 96, 2 (Spring 2006): 203–231. 11 See, especially, Willi Goetschel, “Scholem’s Diaries, Letters, and New Literature on his Work”, Germanic Review 72 (1977): 77–91. 12 Ohana, “Fascism as a Political Community of Experience: Following Walter Benjamin’s Political Phenomenology”, Democratic Culture 9 (2005): 7–48. [Hebrew]. 13 Michael Brenner, “From Self-Declared Messiah to Scholar of Messianism: The Recently Published Diaries of Young Gerhardt Scholem in a New Light”, Jewish Social Studies 3 (1996): 179. 14 Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem – Memories of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn, Foreword by Moshe Idel, Philadelphia 2012, 19, 30, 41–42, 71, 83–84, 144–145. 15 Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 26. 16 Solomon Liptzin, ed. From Novalis to Nietzsche: Anthology of Nineteenth Century German Literature, New York 1929. 17 B. Haywood, Novalis, the Veil of Imagery 1959. 18 Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, London 1957. 19 Isaak Iselin, Philosophische Mutmassungen über die Geschichte der Menschheit, Hildesheim and New York, 1769.

Zarathustra or Messiah?  211 20 Johann G. Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Gescichte zur Bildung der Menschheit 1774. 21 Gotthold E. Lessing, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechtes, Berlin 1780. 22 Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum, Werke, Bd. V, Berlin 1819–1825. 23 Immanuel Kant, Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in wellbürgerlicher Absicht, V III Berlin 1912. 24 Alexis Philonenko, Théorie et praxis dans la pensée morale et politique de Kant et de Fichte en 1793, Paris 1968. 25 P.C. Hayner, Reason and Existence: Schelling’s Philosophy of History, Leiden 1967. 26 G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, New York, 1956. 27 Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 57; 22 May 1915. 28 Ibid., 68; 19 September 1915. 29 Brenner, “From Self-Declared Messiah”, 179. 30 Steven E. Aschheim, “The Metaphysical Psychologist: On the Life and Letters of Gershom Scholem”, The Journal of Modern History 76 (December 2004): 913. 31 Robert Wistrich, “Herzl Following the Messiah”, in David Ariel-Yoel et al., eds., The War of Gog and Magog: Messianism and Apocalypse in Judaism – In the Past and Present, Tel Aviv 2001, 125–141. [Hebrew]. 32 Charles Bloch, “Theodor Herzl and Joseph S. Bloch”, Herzl Year Book 1 (1958): 158–164. 33 Theodor Herzl, Diaries 3 Vols., Jerusalem 1997–2001. [Hebrew]. 34 Ibid., I, 7. 35 David Ben-Gurion, My Father’s House, Tel Aviv 1974, 16. [Hebrew]. 36 Ben-Gurion, Recollections, London 1970, 34. 37 Ben-Gurion, Davar, 9 October 1957. [Hebrew]. 38 Anita Shapira, “Whatever Happened to the Negation of the Diaspora?” Alpayim 25 (2003): 9–54. [Hebrew]. 39 Ohana, “The Myth of Prometheus: Zionism and the Modernization of Messianism”, Modernism and Zionism, 80–122. 40 Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 48–49. 41 Ibid., 69–71; 21 September 1915. 42 On Nietzsche’s attitude to the state, see Tracy Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, Berkeley 1975. 43 Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 77; 15 November 1915. 44 Ibid., 145–146. 45 Ashheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer – Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times, Bloomington 2001, 14–15, 102–103; idem., “The Metaphysical Psychologist”, 906. 46 Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, Berkeley 1961; Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reichm, Cambridge 1984. 47 Pachter, “Masters of Cultural History”, 22. 48 Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, trans. David Maisel, New Haven 2010, 78–92, 115–128, 141–158, 247–278. 49 George Mosse, “Gershom Scholem as a German Jew”, Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism, Hanover and London 1993, 176–192. 50 Wasserstrom, Religion After Religion, 217. 51 Gershom Scholem, Das Davidschild – Geschichte eines Symbols, Berlin 2010; idem., “The Star of David: History of a Symbol”, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, New York 1971, 257–281. 52 Yosef Schwartz, “Paper Tiger”, Haaretz, 21 April 2009. [Hebrew]. 53 Pachter, op. cit., 16. 54 Alter, “The Achievement of Gershom Scholem”, 76. 55 Pachter, op. cit., 17; Scholem, “Kabbalah and Myth”, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim, New York 1969.

212  The resurrection of myth 56 Ohana, “J.L. Talmon, Gershom Scholem and the Price of Messianism”, History of European Ideas 34, 2 (June 2008): 169–188. 57 Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin”, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, New York 1971 [1937], 87. 58 Bronoslaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, Religion and Other Essays, Boston 45, 1948; idem., Myth in Primitive Psychology, London 1926. 59 Ernst Cassirer, Symbol, Myth and Culture, New Haven 1979. 60 Pachter, op. cit., 23. 61 Hans Jonas, “Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism”, Social Research (December 1952): 430–452. 62 David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, Cambridge, MA 1979, 35. 63 Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State, New Haven 1946. 64 On the affinity to Nietzsche of the Frankfurt school, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950, Boston 1973. 65 Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. and trans. Jose Harris, Cambridge 2001. 66 Pachter, op. cit., 19. 67 Jay, op. cit. 68 Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, Berkeley 1991. 69 Ernst Bloch, Thomas Münzer Als Theologe der Revolution, Frankfurt am Main 1960. 70 Scholem, “Wohnt Gott in Herzen eines Atheisten Zu Ernst Bloch 90 Geburstag”, Der Spiegel, 29 (1975): 110–114. 71 Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses, Paris 1966. 72 Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin”, 89. 73 Ibid., 91. 74 Ibid., 94. 75 Ibid., 96. 76 Ohana, The Myth of Niobe, 11–17. 77 Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin”, 96. 78 Ibid., 97. 79 Ibid., 100. 80 Ibid., 104. 81 Joseph Dan, “Jewish Gnosticism?” Jewish Studies Quarterly 2 (1995): 309–328. 82 Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin”, 105. 83 Ibid., 109. 84 Ohana, “Introduction”, The Dawn of Political Nihilism. 85 Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin”, 110. 86 Ibid., 112. 87 Ibid., 122. 88 Ohana, Homo Mythicus, 106–115. 89 Zeev Galili interviews Scholem, “Messianism, Zionism and Anarchy in the Language”, Continuity and Rebellion, 57. 90 Scholem, “Reflections on the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time”, Explications and Implications – Writings on Jewish Heritage and Renaissance, Tel Aviv 1982, 76. [Hebrew]. 91 Avraham Shapira, “Introduction: Heritage as a Source to Renaissance  – The Spiritual Identity of Gershom Scholem”, ibid., vol. II: 15; for a further interpretation, see also Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “The Golem of Scholem: Messianism and Zionism in the Writings of Rabbi Avraham Isaac Hakohen Kook and Gershom Scholem”, in C. Miedling ed., Politik und Religion in Judentum, Tübingen 1999, 223–238.

Zarathustra or Messiah?  213 92 For criticism of the limitation of the understanding of the Messianic phenomenon to its apocalyptic aspect alone and an exposition of the place of this interpretation in the public discourse and in the work of Scholem’s pupils, see Moshe Idel, “Messianic Scholars: On Early Israeli Scholarship, Politics and Messianism”, Modern Judaism 32, 1 (February 2012): 22–53. 93 David Biale, “The Threat of Messianism: An Interview with Gershom Scholem”, The New York Review of Books, 14 August 1980. 94 Ehud Ben-Ezer, “Zionism – Dialectic of Continuity and Rebellion”, in Robert Alter, foreword., Unease in Zion, New York 1974, 278. 95 Ohana, “Gershom Scholem; Neither Canaanism Nor Messianism”, The Origins of Israeli Mythology, 90–95. 96 Ohana, “The Israeli Identity and the Canaanite Option”, in Katell Berthelot, Joseph E. David and Marc Hirschman, eds., The Gift of the Land and the Fate of the Canaanites in Jewish Thought, Oxford 2014, 311–351. 97 Galili, Interviews with Scholem, 58. 98 Scholem to Ben-Gurion, 24.10.1966, Ben-Gurion Archive. [Hebrew]. 99 Ohana. “Secular Messianism as Political Theology: The Case of David Ben-Gurion”, in Cristoph Schmidt and Eli Shenfeld, eds., Jewish Modernity and Political Theology, Tel Aviv 2008, 204–225. 100 David Ben-Gurion to Gershom Scholem, 2 November  1966, Ben-Gurion Archive. [Hebrew]. 101 David Ohana and Robert Wistrich, “The Presence of Myths in Judaism, Zionism and Israeliness”, Myth and Memory – Transfigurations of the Israeli Consciousness, 11–46. [Hebrew]. 102 Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin”, 123. 103 Ibid., 127–128. 104 Scholem, “The Sabbatian Movement in Poland”, Studies and Texts Concerning the History of Sabbataianism and Its Metamorphoses, Jerusalem 1974, 68–140. [Hebrew]. 105 Ibid. 106 Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin”, 130. 107 Albert Camus, The Rebel, New York 1956, 65–66. See also Geoffrey S. Kirk, ed. The Cosmic Fragments, New York 1962; Jean Granier, Le Problème de la vérité dans la philosophie de Nietzsche, Paris 1966, 190–200. 108 Scholem, “Religious Authority and Mysticism”, 28–29. 109 Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin”, 55. 110 Ibid., 56. 111 Ibid., 57 112 Ibid., 58. 113 Scholem, “The Sabbatian Movement in Poland”, 128. 114 Roni Weinstein, Kabbalah and Jewish Modernity, Tel Aviv 2011. [Hebrew]. 115 Pachter, op. cit., 32. 116 Scholem, “A Sabbatian Will from New York”, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, London 1971, 167–175. 117 Wasserstrom, Religion After Religion, 216. 118 Scholem, Walter Benjamin, The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn, New York 2000, 136. 119 Jeffrey Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for Children, Chicago 1993. 120 Wasserstrom, op. cit., 219; Pierre Klossowski, “The Marquis de Sade and the Revolution”, [Tuesday, 7 February 1939]; The College of Sociology, 1937–1939, ed. Denis Hollier, trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis 1988, 218–233. 121 Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin”, 137.

214  The resurrection of myth 122 Georges Bataille, Nietzsche et les fascistes: réparation à Nietzsche, Paris 1937. 123 Wasserstrom, op. cit., 220–222; Michael Richardson, “Sociology on the Razor’s Edge: Configurations of the Sacred at the College of Sociology”, Theory, Culture and Society 9 (1992): 27–44. 124 Denis de Rougemont, The Devil’s Share: An Essay on the Diabolic in Modern Society, trans. Haakon Chevalier, New York 1956. 125 Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, London 1990. 126 There was a close affinity between the Eranos Circle, to which Scholem belonged, and Ernst Jünger. See Nigel Jones, “The Writer as Warrior: An Encounter with Ernst Jünger”, London Magazine 23, 4 (1983): 62–68; Wasserstrom, op. cit., 344, note 47. 127 Josef Pieper, No One Could Have Known: An Autobiography: The Early Years 1904– 1945, San Francisco 1987, 176. 128 Scholem, “The Sabbatean Movement in Poland”, 132. 129 Eric Jacobson, Metaphysic of the Profane, The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, New York 2003. 130 Aileen Kelly, Miikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism, New Haven 1987. 131 Rachel Elior, “Jacob Frank and His Book”, 487–497. [Hebrew]. 132 Lazier, God Interrupted, 184–185. 133 Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism”, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York 1995, 1–36. 134 Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane, 74; Scholem, Judaica, IV, 80. 135 Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for Children, 43. 136 Ohana, “Georges Sorel and the Rise of Political Myth”, History of European Ideas 13, 6 (1991): 733–746. 137 Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Jerusalem 1941, 300. 138 Mehlman, op. cit., 43. 139 Scholem, “Der Nihilismus als religiöses Phänomen”, Eranos (1974), 43 (1977): 1–50. 140 Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as a Philosopher, New York 1965, 29. 141 Offelia Schutte, Beyond Nihilism – Nietzsche Without Masks, Chicago 1984; for another interpretation, see Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, IV, Pfullingen 1961, 18. 142 Ohana, “The Nietzschean Revolution”, The Dawn of Political Nihilism, 13–53. 143 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, II, Frankfurt 1995, 134, 154. 144 Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane, 67. 145 Scholem, “Der Nihilismus als religiöses Phänomen”. 146 Ibid. 147 Karl Löwith, “The Historical Background of European Nihilism”, Nature, History and Existentialism, Northwestern 1966. 148 Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche and Christianity, trans. E.H. Ashton, Chicago 1961. 149 Gianni Vatimo, ed., La Sécularisation de la pensée, trans. Charles Alunni, Paris 1986. 150 Ohana, The Dawn of Political Nihilism, 37–44. 151 Shane Weller, Modernism and Nihilism, New York 2011. 152 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Werke III, Leipzig 1816, 22. 153 Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. W. Cerf and H. S. Harris, Albany 1977. 154 Dietrich Von Engelhardt, “Romanticism in Germany”, in Roy Porter and Mikuláŝ Teich, eds., Romanticism in National Context, Cambridge 1988, 109–133. 155 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, London 1906. 156 Frederick C. Copelston, Philosophy in Russia – From Herzen to Lenin and Berdyaev, Indiana 1986; Evgeniï Lampert, Sons Against Fathers – Studies in Russian Radicalism and Revolution, Oxford 1965. 157 Scholem, “Der Nihilismus als religiöses Phänomen”.

Zarathustra or Messiah?  215 158 Scholem, Judaica, IV, 130. 159 Ibid. 160 Ibid., 131. 161 Lazier, God Interrupted, 179. 162 Ibid., 180. 163 Ibid., 192. 164 Baruch Kurzweil, “Remarks on Gershom Scholem’s Sabbatai Zevi”, In the Struggle for Jewish Values, Jerusalem 1969, 99–134. [Hebrew]. 165 Lazier, op. cit., 136–137. 166 R. Pippin, “Irony and Affirmation in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, in A. Gillespie and B. Strong, eds., Nietzsche’s New Seas – Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics, Chicago 1988; P. Rethy, “The Tragic Affirmation of the Birth of Tragedy”, Nietzsche Studien 6 (1977): 261–291. 167 C.S. Taylor, “Nietzsche’s Schopenhauerianism”, Nietzsche Studien 17 (1988): 45–73. 168 The correspondence between Gershom Scholem and Ernst Jünger, Gershom Scholem Archive, National Library, file 1599013034, 4*. 169 Stanley Rosen, Nihilism – A Philosophical Essay, New Haven 1969; E. Brock, Das Weltbild Ernst Jünger – Darstellung und Deutung, Zürich 1945. 170 Jünger, Der Arbeiter, Berlin 1932; Ohana, “Nietzsche’s Dimension of Fascism: The Case of Ernst Jünger”, in Jacob Golomb and Robert Wistrich, eds., Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? Princeton 2002, 263–290. 171 Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern, Berlin 1920, 120–126; Ohana, “Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger – From Nihilism to Totalitarianism”, History of European Ideas XI (1989): 751–758. 172 Ernst Jünger to Gershom Scholem, 1974, op. cit. 173 Gershom Scholem to Ernst Jünger, April 1974. 174 Ernst Jünger to Gershom Scholem, 20 April 1975. 175 Ibid. 176 Ohana, “Fascism as a Political Community of Experience”, 47–48. 177 Walter Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism – On the Collection of Essays ‘War and Warrior’, ed. Ernst Jünger”, New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979): 120–128. 178 H. Hillach, “The Aesthetics of Politics – Walter Benjamin’s Theories of German Fascism”, New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979): 120–128. 179 John Norr, “German Social Theory and the Hidden Face of Technology”, European Journal of Sociology, XV, 2 (1974), 315; Walter Stuve, Elites Against Democracy – ­Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890–1933, Princeton 1973. 180 Rosen, op. cit., 118; Jünger, “Die Totale Mobilmachtung”, Krieg und Krieger, Berlin 1930. 181 Ernst Jünger to Gershom Scholem, 20 April 1975. 182 On Scholem’s attitude to the First World War, see his autobiographical work, From Berlin to Jerusalem. 183 Gershom Scholem to Ernst Jünger, 28 April 1975. 184 Jeremiah 10:10. 185 Gershom Scholem, “The Golem of Prague and the Golem of Rehovot”, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 335–340. 186 Moshe Idel, Golem  – Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Antropoid, Albany 1990. 187 Ethics of the Fathers, 3, 14. 188 Scholem, “The Golem of Prague and the Golem of Rehovot”. 189 Henri Atlan, “Introduction”, in Idel, Golem, 11–28. 190 A. Huyssen, “The Vamp and the Machine – Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis”, New German Critique 24–25 (1981–1982): 221–237. 191 Scholem, “The Golem of Prague and the Golem of Rehovot”; idem., “The Idea of the Golem”, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, New York 1969, 158–204.

216  The resurrection of myth 192 193 194 195 196

Atlan, op. cit, 25. Idel, Golem, 29. André Neher, Faust et le Maharal de Prague, le mythe et le réel, Paris 1987. J.J. Salomon, Le destin technologique, Paris 1992, 19. D. Lecourt, Prométhée, Faust, Frankenstein – Fondements imaginaires de l’éthique, Le Plessis-Robinson 1996. 197 Hans Jonas, Le principe responsibilité: une éthique pour la civilisation technologique, Paris 1990; idem., “Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism”, Social Research 19 (1952): 430–452; Eric Voegelin, “A  Review of the Origins of Totalitarianism”, Review of Politics (January 1953): 68–76. 198 Scholem, “On Our Language: A  Confession”, History and Memory 2, 2 (Winter 1990): 97–99. See also Stéphan Mosès, “Scholem and Rosenzweig: The Dialectics of History”, History and Memory 2, 2 (1990): 100–116; Rivka Horwitz, “Franz Rosenzweig and Gershom Scholem on Zionism and the Jewish People”, Jewish History 6, 1–2 (1992): 99–111. 199 Muki Tsur, “With Gershom Scholem: An Interview”, in Werner J. Dannhauser, eds., On Jews and Judaism in Crisis – Selected Essays, New York 1976, 44. 200 Buber, People and Universe, 244. 201 Scholem, “On Our Language: A Confession”. 202 Uriel Tal, “Hermeneutical Aspects of Social Theology According to Jewish Sources”, Sidic 12 (1979): 4–15; Paul Mendes-Flohr, “ ‘The Stronger and the Better Jews’: Jewish Theological Responses to Political Messianism in Weimar Republic”, Studies in Contemporary Jewry VII (1991): 159–185; Richard Wolin, “Reflections on Jewish Secular Messianism”, Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas, Amerherst 1995, 43–54. 203 Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’ ”, Selected Writing, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and others, Cambridge, MA 2003, 401–411. 204 Shalom Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism: The Radical Circle in Brit Shalom, 1925–1935, Leiden 2002. 205 Ohana, “Secular Messianism as a Political Theology”. 206 Norman Podhoretz, “Redemption Through Politics”, Commentary (January 1971): 5–6. 207 Irving Howe Interviews Gershom Scholem. “The Only Thing in My Life I  Have Never Doubted Is the Existence of God”, Present Tense VIII,1 (Autumn 1980): 53–57. 208 Ibid. 209 Muki Tzur, “With Gershom Scholem: An Interview”, 26. 210 Ibid., 33. 211 Ohana, “Fascism as a Political Community Experience: Following Walter Benjamin’s Political Phenomenology”, Democratic Culture 9 (2005): 7–48. [Hebrew]. 212 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi – The Mystical Messiah 1626–1676, XII. 213 Baruch Kurzweil, In the Struggle for Jewish Values, Tel Aviv 1969, III. [Hebrew]. 214 Zvi Werblowsky, “Reflections on Shabbetai Zevi by Gershom Scholem”, Molad 9,42 (1985–6), 22. [Hebrew]. 215 Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Judaism”, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, 35–36. Scholem repeated these words in his concluding remarks at a study conference on the subject of “The Messianic idea in Jewish Though”, held in honor of his birthday at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities on December 4–5 1977. See, Scholem, “Messianism – A Never Ending Quest (1977)”, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time and Other Essays, Jerusalem, 102–113. 216 Irving Howe interviews Gershom Scholem. 217 Muki Tzur, “With Gershom Scholem: An Interview”. 218 Scholem, “Reflections on Jewish Theology”, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 284.

Zarathustra or Messiah?  217 219 Ohana, “The Leviathan Opens Wide its Jaws: Carl Schmitt and the Origins of Legal Fascism”, Law and History, eds. Daniel Gutwein and Menachem Mautner, Jerusalem 1999, 273–304. [Hebrew]. 220 Vincent Decombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans L. Scott Fox and J.M. Harding, Cambridge 1980, 180–186. 221 Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies – Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, New York 2006. 222 For further reading on Scholem and the implications of Messianism see Amos Funkenstein, “Gershom Scholem: Charisma, Kairos, and the Messianic Dialectic”, History and Memory 4,1 (1992): 123–139; Joseph Dan, “Gershom Scholem and Jewish Messianism”, in Paul Mendes-Flohr, ed., Gershom Scholem: The Man and His Work, New York 1994, 73–86; Jacob Taubes, “The Price of Messianism”, Journal of Jewish Studies 23, 1–2 (1982): 595–600. 223 Ohana, “The Role of Myth in History: Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Sorel”.

Part IV

Nietzsche in the Holy Land

7 The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit

The Hebrew revival in the shadow of Nietzsche Baruch Kurzweil pointed out that in Nietzsche’s early essay The Birth of Tragedy, Socrates exemplifies the rational approach to life, and Euripides is the aesthetic mirror-image of that rationality.1 According to Nietzsche, from the time of Socrates poetry became the servant of philosophy, thus initiating an ever-increasing decadence. Socrates rejected art when he denied the possibility of action without a reason. These symptoms, said Nietzsche, showed that Socrates, if not through his initiative, then through his revolutionary radicalization, brought Hellenic culture to the verge of decadence. This decadence gave rise to a man estranged from his nature as a Greek and from human nature as such. Drama denuded of tragic myth and music stripped of its Dionysian-creative quality bore witness to weariness, decline and degeneration. Thus, Socrates was the father of scientific rationalism. Likewise, Nietzsche in his later works such as The Twilight of the Idols, preferred vital, creative forces to rationality. According to Kurzweil’s reading of Nietzsche, the Athens of Socrates and Plato was in a decadent phase in which there was a weakening of vital forces. It was a period of crisis when life was dominated by reason and knowledge. In a period of degeneracy, people automatically turn to a rational dialectic characterized by a pathological moralism. Kurzweil described the process whereby Nietzscheanism penetrated the culture of the Hebrew revival: With all the critical faculties and caution required when approaching Nietzsche, one should not forget for a moment that one is dealing with a great, interesting, tragic and forthright personality who is not to be confused with his petty and superficial followers. But already in what has been said so far one can see how great, how widespread Nietzsche’s influence was on our writers at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our writers took hold of his anti-rationalist tendencies with regard to spiritual matters and life and transferred the anti-Christian bias in his writings to the internal controversy within Judaism.2 This “great, interesting, tragic and forthright personality”, according to Kurzweil, was responsible for the “Nietzschean transformation” – the liberation of modern

222  Nietzsche in the Holy Land man from “the shackles of subjection to Judeo-Christian morality”. Christianity, the “slave-religion”, oppressed the body and degraded life for the sake of spiritual values. The revolt of the body against the despotism of the intellect (“the body has more wisdom than the spirit”) represented a shift from ethics to aesthetics. “Sin”, wrote Nietzsche in The Gay Science, “is a Jewish sentiment, a Jewish invention”. A judgment of this kind, or a similar one, was enthusiastically welcomed by young Jews and Hebrew writers who wished to turn a new page in their lives or in that of the nation. The revolutionary outlook that placed “life” at the center had far-reaching implications for the concept of personal freedom and religious morality: it expressed the “victory of the deep life-instincts of the individual over the spiritual morality of the religious community”.3 The themes of “lost youth” and “nativism” were also, in Kurzweil’s opinion, part of the culture of the Hebrew revival with its Nietzschean qualities. The idea of “lost youth” attacked the theft of youth and demanded the happiness that was not to be found in knowledge and reason but in life, as in Tchernichovsky’s poem “Before a Statue of Apollo”: “The light of God is mine [. . .]. Life, ah life! The light of God and life!” “Nativism” emphasized the here-and-now, the contemporary and the native.4 The character of the here-and-now in Tchernikovsky bears the stamp of the Nietzschean philosophy of life, but it was also characteristic of other poets and writers of the Hebrew revival, such as Shneur who advocated a primitive and archaic life and an individualism freed from all social and moral obligations. Kurzweil declared that in his profound psychological analyzes Nietzsche exposed the nakedness of rational concepts and normative values. In stripping away the masks from morality, religion, and art, Nietzsche anticipated the analyzes of Freud.5 Nietzsche, as a genealogist of culture, used an interesting psychological method: the exposure of the psychological mechanisms underlying beliefs and values undermined their “absolute” validity and revealed the deception inherent in the slave morality. The “good” was revealed as the dishonest instrument of the weak for the purpose of overcoming those who were stronger. The slaverevolt of Judaism was first and foremost a victory of ressentiment (GM I  10). Ressentiment – an introverted and repressed sense of animosity – became a creative force that “transvaluated values”. An examination of Nietzsche’s analysis brings us to the conclusion that, in his view, for the nobleman, there were no people who were evil in the moral sense, but only inferiors, from whom, however, he did not make any normative demands in the name of an ideal. On the other hand, the weak man was consumed with a sick hatred of the strong, not because of anything he had done, but because of the very fact of his strength and wholeness. Because he could not afford the honest reaction of taking a real vengeance, the weak man abandoned himself to a feeling of ressentiment. The weak man’s transvaluation of values expressed by the establishment of the slave morality was not a real act of independence, but the unripe fruit of a repressed hatred reacting in a sick and unhealthy manner. Reaction instead of initiative, repression instead of instinct, the substituted vengeance of the transvaluation of values instead of confrontation and self-mastery – all these, in Nietzsche’s

The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit  223 view, were characteristic of the perverted will to power of the weak. Nietzsche rejected the idea of external commandments: the strong man’s evaluation was not accompanied by a binding norm, while the weak man was usually bound by the norm. The subjects of ressentiment became weapons of war in the new culture, which arose in place of the old one: a culture is a function of its scale of values. The new values legislated by Judaism – the slave morality – destroyed the old culture and gave rise to a new culture based on one’s fellow man, on social foundations. The social superstructure – religion, morality, culture – was set up as an artificial framework for the protection of the weak man who found it difficult to cope with his neighbor and his world. Just as the slave morality, as the perverted will to power of the weak, characterized a decadent culture, so the aristocratic morality, as the authentic will to power of the strong, creates a healthy culture. Nietzsche’s point of view made it clear that he, the historian of culture, wished to remain within the area of discourse of Western culture, and he did not intend an obliteration of that culture and a return to the chaotic condition of nature. His aim was to restore nature to culture, and by that means to pass from a decadent culture to an authentic one. The revolution that Nietzsche wanted to carry out was within the culture and not against it. The elements of construction and destruction were to be found within the culture itself, and the processes of sickness and recuperation, decadence, and alienation were like the signs of an inner struggle. In this respect, the transvaluation of values was the fuel driving history. The Nietzschean rebellion, which, according to Kurzweil was primarily a rejection of western morality and a denial of God, subverted human life. A new divinity, Dionysius, was crowned in place of the old God. “The just demands of the instincts” replaced spirit, knowledge, and religious belief. Nietzsche’s “old-new divinity Dionysius was the diametrical opposite of the God of the Bible and the New Testament. This is the god of life and not the God of spirit. He celebrates the victory of the instincts over the intellect”.6 Kurzweil asserted that the triumph of Dionysian myth over Socratic logic is a step backward for humanity. Nietzsche’s adulation of “life” and praise of a morality that awakens archaic forces from their sleep was contrary to Jewish tradition. Kurzweil made no attempt to reconcile the Nietzschean revolt with Jewish ethics. Combining radical criticism with penetrating intellectual analysis, he came to the conclusion that “Ahad Ha-Am was far from a true understanding of the Nietzschean spirit”.7 An abyss separated Nietzsche’s basic assumption that “we no longer find the root of man in the ‘spirit’, in God. We have put him back among the animals”, from the Judeo-Christian belief that man is created in God’s image. All the means that have been used until now to make humanity more moral, said Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Idols, quoted by Kurzweil, have been basically immoral.8 Nietzsche’s criticism was the most radical that one could imagine. Although Kurzweil mentioned Bergson, Klages, and Freud as proponents of the idea that the “the truth of life is the discovery of the superiority of the irrational and subterranean elements in the human soul”, he was convinced that Nietzsche was “more than anyone else, the thinker whose personality has set its mark on the

224  Nietzsche in the Holy Land whole period [. . .]. No one can be compared to him in the power of his assault on the foundations of European thought”.9 The anthropological problem that sets man above all other philosophical issues was also reflected in art and literature. The intellectual and spiritual affinity of Nietzsche to Stendhal and Dostoevsky revealed hidden aspects of modern man: “The great sinners, the revolutionary amoralists and the nihilistic saints raised their voices here and were harbingers of things to come”.10 It is not surprising that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were present in the literature of the Hebrew revival, and in any case, it is an indisputable fact that the Hebrew writers embraced the Nietzschean anti-bourgeois rebellion and philosophy of life.11 Zalman Shneur was the first Hebrew writer to adopt in a radical way what Kurzweil called the “Promethean pose”  – a rejection of the shackles of morality, an aspiration to total liberty, an affirmation of the aesthetic character of the individual – to such a degree that Kurzweil had the impression that the poet was still bound by the chains of the past.12 In his violent repudiation of the legacy of the past there was a hint of exaggeration.13 Shneur gloried in the primitive, in a vital intoxication with life, in a taste for the wild and anarchistic. Schneur who, in his poem “On the Banks of the Seine” wrote that “G-d is dead, but man has not yet been resurrected” might be considered the greatest Nietzschean among the Hebrew renaissance poets. As in the case of Berdichevsky and Tchernichovsky, one also finds pagan rituals in Schneur’s work (“Hidden Tablets”) and the longing for beauty, in contrast to the culture of the priests and prophets: “What are you doing here, Creator of Beauty? You will never light a spark in the hearts of these shopkeepers”. Schneur’s poem “I  Understand” is interesting in its approach to accepting the concept of the “Superman” in his poetry. “The fog cleared for me, and the ape rose up into a man”.14 In 1920, Y. H. Brenner criticized Schneur’s “heroic” interpretation of Nietzsche, “as that of a militant journalist, who saw Nietzsche’s rear but not his face”.15 Does Schneur also see the “Superman” as a still unfulfilled promise? The demands of Jewish tradition oppressed the poet, who wished to shatter the chains of culture, morality, and courtesy, as we see in the last line of his poem “In the Night of Desire”, in which Shneur declared, “To hell with politeness and its restrictions!” This led directly to the poems “Hidden Tablets”, “Original Sin”, “Moloch”, and “Let Us Go and Be There”. In the poem “Obligations”, one again finds the poet positioning himself beyond good and evil. Kurzweil called Shneur “the Prometheus of modern Hebrew poetry”,16 but one should remember that the source from which he drew was always the traditional Jewish texts. Kurzweil maintained that the preference for “life” over “books” was not a mere fashion in the literature of the Hebrew revival but an immanent phenomenon that also affected Saul Tchernikovsky. The waves of the Lebensphilosophie engulfed Jewish humanists like Tchernikovsky and anticipated “new Hebrews” like Yonatan Ratosh and Aharon Amir in their taste for ancient myths. Before Kurzweil, Joseph Klausner drew attention to Tchernikovsky’s affinity to Nietzsche as a representative of “humanity”. Klausner discerned a “Nietzschean moment” at the

The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit  225 time of the Zionist congresses and of the controversy between Berdichevsky and Ahad Ha-Am. He wrote, Tchernikovsky, who at that time was totally steeped in classical Greek poetry and the Homeric Goethe, was also in his “Nietzschean period”, and in most of the poems he wrote at that time he celebrated the beauty of life, the splendor of nature and the joys of love in the spirit of old-new paganism, or he “strove with God” – fought the ascetic Judeo-Christian morality which in his opinion deprived Israel of the strength to create a kingdom, to govern, and to have a full enjoyment of life.17 Tchernikovsky, who, like Berdichevsky, wished to break open the sluice-gates between “humanity” and Judaism, seized upon Nietzsche as a treasure-trove. For the German philosopher, Greek culture was the “jewel in the crown” of aesthetics, and for the Hebrew poet, it was more than that: it was the opposite of the Jewish “bookcase” (cult of learning). Tchernikovsky’s early poetry (“Songs of the Exiles”, “Facing the Sea”), and especially his most Nietzschean poem, “Before a Statue of Apollo”, expressed an adulation of Dionysian vitality and ancient Hebrew heroes. The critic Hillel Barzel has pointed out that although there is no direct mention of the name of Nietzsche, there are many Nietzschean elements in Tchernikovsky’s poetry, and they bear witness to the “affinities between the modern Hebrew poet and the revolutionary German thinker who preceded him”.18 The Dionysian and Canaanite rites were present in Tchernikovsky from Heidelberg at the beginning of his path to Tel Aviv in the poet’s last years.19 In the poem, “A Vision of the Prophet of Eshtar”, written in Palestine, there was a turning to Baal and Eshtar, who represent “life”. This poem was the poet’s declaration of the actuality of archaic myth, represented by mythical depictions of sexual fertility: a declaration that ends, according to Kurzweil, “in the Nietzschean manner, with the proclamation of a ‘new God’ who is the ancient idol”.20 With many references to The Birth of Tragedy, The Twilight of the Idols, and Daybreak, Kurzweil linked the Nietzschean criticism of Western culture for its rational path since Socrates to Tchernikovsky’s glorification of the god Dionysius. This affinity was a negative reaction to the Jewish culture of “the book” with its burden of history, its sense of pessimism, and its lack of eroticism and aesthetics.

From Berdichevsky to Ratosh Berdichevsky was the leader and inaugurator of the existential wave in the culture of the Hebrew revival. As a yeshiva student who turned heretical, he shifted the focus of his personal and national identity from the page of the Gemara and rabbinical authority to the individual, and from the Sovereign of the universe to man who was sovereign over himself and the universe. Kurzweil suggested that one should not make any distinction between Berdichevsky the historian and Berdichevsky the storyteller as his existentialist heroes have an autobiographical

226  Nietzsche in the Holy Land character, are oppressed by the burden of life, seek liberation from the yoke of spirituality and again and again confront a wall of conformity. The repression of eros on the one hand and an excess of spirituality had the result that “we became a non-people, non-nation, not human”.21 The neurotic modern Jew feels that he embodies a generations-old curse, lives his national past intensively and develops a feeling of ressentiment (a grudging hostility, according to Nietzsche) towards that past. “Life” may rebel against “the book”, but the individual remains bound. Berdichevsky’s critique of Jewish history, which according to him sapped the vitality of life with its weight, drew inspiration from Nietzsche’s ideas about history. Nietzsche rejected the historical tradition accepted in the nineteenth century and proposed a “historical perspectivism”.22 His main purpose was to destroy the notion that the historical past taught some single truth, proved some general concept, or constituted a universal key. In his view, as in that of Burkhardt, there were as many truths to the historical past as there were individual perspectives. People had to look at history according to the motivation of life and not as a rational oracle, objective, compass or moral beacon. Objective history was not a possibility. If history was no more than a means for the individual interpretation of each person, who drew his conclusions from it, used it for his own purposes and received from it support for his own conceptions, then all the projections cast upon historicism by the Enlightenment and romanticism fell away Like its European counterparts, Jewish national ideology drew on romantic tradition, attempting to restore the distant national past in order to legitimize a separate group identity. The emerging nationalism sought to justify itself through history. Ahad Ha-Am was the most outstanding exponent of this historicist trend that emphasized that past generations had served to pave the road towards national redemption and progress. Another dimension of Western cultural influence on Ahad Ha-Am’s Zionist thought was the humanistic nationalism of the mid-nineteenth century, which endeavored to integrate a sense of national destiny with the longing for universality. This romantic nationalist vision of a brotherhood of nations, each with its own unique mission, was shared by Giuseppe Mazzini and Adam Mickiewicz. To Mazzini’s “Third Rome”, with its messianic echoes and Mickiewicz’s vision of Poland as “the Christ of Nations”, Ahad Ha-Am added a higher sense of ethics as the universal destiny of Jewish nationalism. Berdichevsky, close to Nietzsche’s existential philosophy, had discovered the German philosopher for the first time during his studies in Berlin in 1893. In a letter to Shkapniuk written in the same year, Berdichevsky wrote, This summer, I read much written by Friedrich Nietzsche, the man is creating such commotion throughout Europe. Perhaps you could obtain his book, Beyond Good and Evil, which has made a stronger impression on me than any other book I have read – He is now in a lunatic asylum.23 During the next two years, which he spent in Switzerland, Berdichevsky saw himself as a pure Nietzschean, defining this concept according to the criteria of power and individualism. In a letter to a friend he wrote, “As I believe you are

The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit  227 aware, I am a Nietzschean [. . .] and know only might, power, power!”24 During the years 1897–1899, he began to change his priorities, placing a greater emphasis on the historical Jewish collectivity rather than on the individual who sanctifies his liberty. Berdichevsky did not, however, completely abandon his German master: witness the fact that when, in 1897, he translated Sefer Hachasidim, he gave it the title The Wanderer and His Shadow (Der Wanderer und sein Schatten, 1880). This was the same title as the second part of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human. Towards the end of his life, when he gathered together all his work, Berdichevsky was careful to remove the Nietzschean quotes and themes. In 1905, he wrote in his diary: Nietzsche’s theories were not the starting point of my ideas, except insofar as I distance myself from tradition and pointed out the damage which traditional morality causes a nation per se; it was as though, on the path to transvaluation, I met him along the way.25 Ahad Ha-Am and Berdichevsky represent two opposing traditions (Hegelian and Nietzschean) with respect to the concept of time in the historical culture of the nineteenth century. Ahad Ha-Am followed Hegel in arguing that if time is infinitely open, then perpetual improvement is a viable concept; thus, the idea of progress is based on the assumption of improvement from the lowest point towards the highest. Berdichevsky, like Nietzsche, negated this value-based imposition on history that he saw as being beyond good and evil. In his view, the idea of progress was a variation of the attempt to imbue a process with inner meaning; if the main point about the will to power is to overcome and to intensify, then the important thing is not completing the historical process, but engaging in it. Life understood as the will to power is the real and central need or as Berdichevsky puts it, “a powerful life, a courageous life”.26 Enlightenment and education are not goals in their own right, but subject to the authority of life itself. The “new Hebrew” following the European “new man” offers an unmediated view of the modern world as an aesthetic experience that should be affirmed. Since reality is dynamic, the human being must not rest on his laurels. He must identify with the rhythm of the world, which is the will to power and with himself as subject. This radical existentialism adopted by Berdichevsky, in the footsteps of Nietzsche, contained a new form of individualist ethics that emphasized the relation of man to himself rather than to his fellow man. Berdichevsky’s voluntarist, revolutionary conception of the past was critical of the approach taken by the “Science of Judaism” as represented by the German-Jewish historians Leopold Zunz and Zachariah Frankel. He respected, however, Abraham Geiger “who with all his great and tempestuous spirit would have desired to renew Israel in the present, rather than making do with its life in the past as did Zunz and his faction”. Within his dynamic conception of the present, Berdichevsky, following Nietzsche, abandoned the guiding hand of historicism, romanticism, enlightenment, and progress. Instead, he preferred the dimension of the actual present, the existential experience as such, over historical understanding.

228  Nietzsche in the Holy Land Out of this kind of existential experience the “new man” emerged who is not motivated by rational assumptions and who abandons accepted ethical distinctions of good and evil. The rebel against history identifies with a world which is the fruit of his own labor, and he thereby becomes authentic rather than decadent. Indeed, one of the main characteristics of the “new man” is the quest for authenticity – a search that was common to philosophers at the turn of the century. Authenticity was a response to the alienation that existed between the individual and his world. Berdichevsky bemoans the fact that “there is nothing that unites us in all the corners of our souls, in our characteristics. There is no total or perfect unity”.27 Turn-of-the-century modernism cultivated the personal style of the “new man”, basing itself on the Nietzschean theory of perspectivism, which argued that there are no facts, only interpretations. Berdichevsky continued in the steps of Nietzsche when he wrote, “There is no single currency, no single class and no single horizon. We do not face two paths, but hundreds of paths; not one way of living, but hundreds of ways”.28 Nietzsche, however, was also misunderstood by Berdichevsky, when he writes in a naturalistic language: “Return to Nature, return to your Mother, to all that is alive and note that precisely as you drew nearest to Nature, to the sanctuary, you are as tall and broad as they are”.29 Nietzsche did not in fact advocate the destruction of culture and a return to a natural or primitive state. Rather he sought to eliminate the dichotomy between intellect and life. Intellect must become nature and nature must be shaped by the “new man”. Transvaluation is one of the merits of the “new man”. In 1882, Nietzsche wrote to Lou Andreas Salomé: “First, man must liberate himself from chains and lastly he must also liberate himself from this liberation”. Berdichevsky’s “new Hebrew” is also marked by transvaluation and self-legislation: “A man gives himself commandments and treads his own path”. As against this, Kurzweil claimed that Judaism cannot be squeezed into a historical straitjacket, since Judaism, as Rosenzweig agreed, is a meta-historical phenomenon: “Rosenzweig rightly places Judaism above time. Rosenzweig says that Judaism is meta-historical and meta-temporal because he is not ready to insert Jewish history into the historical cycle and subject it to the power of time”.30 The Nietzschean critique of the cult of history left its mark on the literature of the Hebrew revival. Kurzweil discerned motifs from Bialik’s poems, such as “In Front of the Bookcase”, at the heart of Berdichevsky’s stories. Berdichevsky’s prose turned Bialik’s poetics into ideas, and the chief one was “the knowledge that liberation from one’s ancestral heritage does not change much for the individual with regard to the irrational burden of the past. This Nietzsche knew well”.31 Nietzsche therefore declared that “a free man is amoral because of his wish to depend on himself and not on his origins”.32 Berdichevsky’s existentialist characters who had escaped from the confining embrace of the past were now seeking their true liberated countenance. The displaced anti-hero had an inner experience and was a stranger to the home that only yesterday was his, like Michael in “Mahana’im” or Nathaniel or Elimelech in “Beyond the River” and “The Raven Has Flown”. The newly enlightened man, who now finds himself on the other side of the fence, between two camps, yearns for a woman as the embodiment of eros

The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit  229 and the symbol of life. His relationship with a Christian woman in “Mahana’im” is of a purely sexual nature and represents a lust for life. Berdichevsky’s heroes wish to break out of the world of shadows, a world far from the sun, from the light of life, from a woman’s warmth.33 Kurzweil ridiculed Berdichevsky’s paradoxical idea, derived from Nietzsche, of proposing a modern myth. In his opinion, a synthesis of modernity and myth is impossible, and this was also true in the case of the Canaanites: “Someone who wages total war against the whole of Judaism in the name of modern, progressive thought, puts himself in a strange position when he tries to prove his realism and practicality by means of arguments from myth”.34 Like Kurzweil, Gershom Scholem also saw that “Canaanism has deep roots with Berdichevsky. A process of centrifugality is taking place among us; young fellows cutting their ties with the entire past and of national existence without a tradition – cutting ties with the recent past”.35 “The ‘Young Hebrews’ were not the first to put their trust in a revival of myth”, wrote Kurzweil. The desire for myth was of supreme importance in Europe in the 1930s, and it was a fashionable field of research in France with the investigations of myth of Georges Dumesnil and Claude Lévi-Strauss.36 When he stayed in Paris in the 1930s, Jonatan Ratosh was drawn into this intellectual climate of a renaissance of myth. Kurzweil was early to analyze this phenomenon of a return to structural systems of larger dimensions than man or his capacity to explain these non-human myths. In other words, the language of myths reveals the “deep stratum” in man, and it is something greater than its creators or interpreters. According to this view, the Promethean Messianism of Zionism, dependent on the freewill of sovereign men, is a retreat to non-human structures, to myths, to a transcendental Messianism. Kurzweil’s comments on the Canaanite phenomenon left a strong imprint on the discourse on identity in Israel and will be the starting-point of all future discussion of the Canaanite option. This conceptual and aesthetic orientation of the literature of the Hebrew revival was in his opinion the daily reality of the native Israelis in their homeland. He believed that the Canaanite movement was a radical and final stage of secularism, bringing to a paradoxical conclusion the aims of Jewish literature in modern times. Kurzweil was the first critic to realize that it was not Jonatan Ratosh’s Canaanite group that should be at the center of the Israeli discourse, but the Canaanite idea that is not connected to one group or another. The scholar Rachel Alboim-Dror agrees, saying, “The concentration of research and attention on a once-only phenomenon manifested in the ‘Young Hebrews’ blurs and diminishes something that is a link in a long and complex chain”.37 Kurzweil was the first Israeli critic to see that one should not identify the Canaanite idea with Ratosh’s group only. His first attack on the Canaanite ideology was not aimed at Ratosh and his group, but rather, in January 1948, at the Israeli journalist Uri Avneri’s intellectual circle, “The Young Eretz-Israel”, and their provocative journal, Bamaavak (In Struggle). The Canaanites held that it is the nativistic and linguistic factors that govern the national consciousness. They were not ideologically marginal but had considerable sociological potential, and

230  Nietzsche in the Holy Land in April 1949 the philosopher Samuel Hugo Bergman declared that the Canaanites expressed “clearly and unhesitatingly what others feel and experience timidly and halfheartedly”.38 Kurzweil, seized on Ha-drasha as a treasure-trove encapsulating “the conceptual principles of the whole of Hazaz’s writings” that “can serve the Young Hebrews as the source of all their ideas on Judaism”. At the same time, he revealed the Canaanite idea, whose early reverberations had been felt in the radical criticisms of Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, Shaul Tchernikovsky, and Yosef Haim Brenner, as having a real potential in the new secular culture. Kurtzweil located the conceptual roots of the Canaanite idea in the culture of the secular awakening in Eastern and Central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century.

The existentialist revolt Ahad Ha-Am’s teachings thus sanctioned a Judaism without God, a Judaism without the binding authority of the Torah.39 His writings mainly influenced nontraditional Jews in Eastern Europe and those without roots in Central and Western Europe, such as those who found a substitute for Judaism in Zionism. For the educationalists in Palestine, he was the teacher of the generation, the national intellectual who made the values of the Bible the focus of the national and secular morality. According to him, the spiritual contribution of the Jewish people – Ahad Ha-Am always thought in national terms – was not the product of divine inspiration but a creation that had taken shape for generations. In “The Transvaluation of Values”, he said, “Almost everyone recognizes the moral genius of the people of Israel, and in this vocation it is superior to all other peoples”. Kurzweil saw this statement as a renunciation of the religious element in Judaism, preferring the national-secular character of a “Jewish testimony to the nations”.40 Ahad Ha-Am chose not to attempt to understand the religious experience just as Freud ignored religion in Totem and Taboo. Thus, Maimonides was stripped of his faith and made into a liberal rationalist: A figure emerged that had a great deal of Ahad Ha-Am combined with Nietzschean elements  – those in Nietzsche’s teaching that Ahad Ha-Am found acceptable [. . .] those in which there was a recognizable similarity between Maimonides’ moral teachings and a different teaching [. . .] that of Nietzsche. Both saw the purpose of human sexuality as the creation of a more complete human prototype, and both made the majority the instrument of a minority in which a higher prototype is embodied.41 Ahad Ha-Am sought to understand the difference between Maimonides’ adam be-fo’al (man in potentia) and Nietzsche’s Übermensch, a difference that marked the boundary between a rationalist and an existentialist. The conclusion Kurzweil came to was that Ahad Ha-Am had neither the capacity nor the will to understand Nietzsche’s criticisms. Just as Ahad Ha-Am failed to understand Maimonides because of his incapacity to comprehend the religious phenomenon, so, according to Kurzweil, he failed

The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit  231 to understand Nietzsche for precisely the same reason. In the atheist conception, the basis of Ahad Ha-Am’s thinking, there was “prophecy without God, without a sender”.42 It was an attempt to create a “theology without God”, to construct a new edifice on the ruins of the Jewish religion, to create an illusion of continuity when in fact there was a cessation of belief. “Ahad Ha-Amish demonism”, to use Kurzweil’s sarcastic expression, wrapped the Ahad Ha-Am counter-revolution in an aura of restraint and tranquility, whereas its real significance was the reduction of Judaism to a purely national manifestation. The climax of the existentialist revolt in the culture of the Hebrew revival is to be found in the Judaism of Brenner which was entirely without faith. Kurzweil described Brenner’s Jewish world as a “Kafka-like scene” in which there was “also a tragic irony in his encounters with Nietzsche’s philosophy of life”.43 Brenner assailed religious culture in the name of the values of life and pronounced a death-sentence  – the annulment of Judaism. His criticism did not relate to one aspect or another but focused on its very essence: Judaism was guilty in itself. Jewish history, a perpetual winter, went on its ridiculous way without hope and without a solution. Its past was without a purpose, and it had no direction for the present or future: “It was always just ‘bereavement and failure’ [. . .] a total dehumanisation, de-personalisation and de-heroicisation”.44 Brenner and Kafka, two modern Jewish writers, revealed the alienation of their kind – the modern Jewish man. Like Otto Weininger, Brenner was drawn to a lethal psychological delineation, diving into an ocean of self-hatred, hatred of Judaism and desire to negate it. In his view, the root of Jewish existence was basically rotten. He was fascinated by the figures of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, but Kurzweil noticed that while the great Russian visionary was characterized by a mystical faith in his mission, and the German philosopher of life created an apparent bridge between the “sick beast” and the Übermensch, the great Hebrew writer had no positive solution apart from a ‘last hope’ of purifying work on the land.45 Brenner’s Ba-horef (In Winter) was an essay in self-loathing, bereft of eros, a sequel to the living dead in Mi-can u-mi-can (From Here and There). Although the influence of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky cannot be seen as the key to understanding Brenner’s world, there is no doubt, said Kurzweil, that Nietzsche’s imprint can be seen in Brenner’s works. For example, the figure of Aryeh Lapidot, the literary portrait of A. D. Gordon, was depicted in Mi-can u-mi-can in a Nietzschean manner: “The individual goes on his way and the herd follows the fashion”. Later, the connection is fully revealed: “A Nietzschean and a Zionist!!”46 In the eyes of his opponents, Lapidot combined two revolutionary elements: Nietzschean doctrines and Zionist teachings. Borsif in Ba-horef is depicted as the opposite of FeiermanBrenner. Feierman told his father that he was traveling to a new country, a universe of true life that had developed as a result of a real transvaluation of values: “In that Ashkenzi [German] country I am going to there is Friedrich Nietzsche who has a thick moustache, and Borsif also has a moustache like that”.47 The reason for his attraction is that in the country of the wearer of the mustache there was

232  Nietzsche in the Holy Land true life, erotic jealousy, and a rejection of moral prohibitions. Nietzsche’s image merges with that of Borsif – two figures who live beyond good and evil. This was a journey from the Jewish spiritual world of the father, Shalom Gazil, to a magical Nietzschean world, a world of life. Further on, Kurzweil observed a Nietzschean affinity in the radical criticism of Judaism of the writers of the Hebrew revival. After Berdichevsky, Tchernikovsky, Shneur, and Brenner, Kurzweil drew attention to Chaim Hazzaz as a writer who waged an all-out war against a state of mind he called a “moonlight psychology”, which was “a different psychology, a sort of psychology of night [. . .]. We love torment, torment in general [. . .] exile, martyrdom, Messiah [. . .] the threefold cord”.48 In reaction to this, he was drawn to vital figures with living impulses. Hence his fondness for epic descriptions of Jewish life, especially Yemenite life. Thus, the story Dorot rishonim (Previous Generations) describes the mediocrity, repression of desire, contraction of life-instincts and signs of sickness of generations that had gone to seed. Kurzweil observed, The following sentences truly evoke the words of Nietzsche: “Do you find it disagreeable, troublers of Israel and destroyers of people, that a man should enjoy himself in this world? You sit fasting as though the whole world was like that, you are defective and spoiled and dead corpses as though the whole world was like that”. This is really a variation of what Nietzsche said against the contempt for life of Christian spirituality.49 Tchernikovsky and Hazzaz fought against the enemies of “life”: religious fanatics and world-reformers on the one hand and modern ideologists preaching the secular redemption of man on the other. Shneur showed his discontent with Jewish culture by his open and direct way of expressing himself; in Hazzaz, the criticism is more muted but no less radical. Ha-drasha (The Sermon) by Chaim Hazzaz was published in Luah Ha-aretz in 1943 and was a heretical piece of writing in which it was said that “the land of Israel is already not Judaism”.50 Kurzweil rightly concluded that these words spoken by Hazzaz’s Yudke are “the source of all their ideas [referring to the Canaanites] about Judaism”.51 Ha-drasha anticipated the Canaanite idea.52 Kurzweil seized upon Ha-drasha as a compendium of the “conceptual principles of all the works of Hazzaz which can serve the Young Hebrews as the source for all their ideas about Judaism”. But Kurzweil was not able to disregard the challenging dialectical aspect of the story, a sort of “negative credo”, unlike the position of the Canaanites, who totally rejected Judaism.53 The “rejection of the exile” existed in various degrees from the founding fathers of Zionism to the generation of the sons in the Yishuv, but “the rejection of Judaism” had no place in the critical dialogue. Kurzweil claimed that “the rejection of Judaism as a spiritual phenomenon whose time had passed, and the necessity of seeing the national revival as something new and even opposed to Judaism are principles of the Berdichevsky school of thought”. The barbs he directed at the literature of the national revival were ideological and relevant, but it should be pointed out that the promoters of

The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit  233 the revival saw it not as a contradiction to Judaism, but an opportunity to give it a new, existential, and modern interpretation.54

Between Nietzsche and Scholem Already in his use of Nietzsche’s phraseology in the title of his article “On the Use and Abuse of the Science of Judaism”, Kurzweil declared that what the German philosopher had to say about modern European historiography in his essay “On the Use and Abuse of History” was devastating with regard to contemporary historiography: For example, a religion which is to be turned into historical knowledge [. . .] a religion which is to be scientifically understood through and through, is by the end of this process immediately destroyed. [. . .]. Such a way of thinking about things has made history the single sovereign, in the place of the other spiritual powers, culture and religion [. . . .]. Only look at the religion of the power of history; pay attention to the priests of the mythology of the Idea!55 Nietzsche’s view of historiography, with which Kurzweil was in agreement, contrasted with the Hegelian dialectic on which Scholem was nurtured. The Wissenschaft des Judentums came into being within “The Society for Jewish Culture and Science”, a society that followed Hegel’s philosophy, with an anti-rabbinic outlook that led its founders into the arms of Christianity. Kurzweil saw in Hegel’s works a complete identity between the state and spirit: the state is the product of the moral idea. The war of the founders of Wissenschaft des Judentums against the authority of halacha and its rabbinic representatives was inspired by Hegelian philosophy, and it is therefore not surprising if they gave the idea of the state a religious sanctity. The state was the limit of all religious activity and subordinated religion to itself. Kurzweil came to the conclusion that the meaning of the rule dina di malchuta dina (“the law of the state is the law”) in its Hegelian version and in the context of the Prussian state was the annulment of Judaism. The legal approach to the condition of the secular Jew in the Hegelian perspective bore a surprising similarity to the Sabbetaian obliteration of halacha expressed in the saying that “the annulment of the Torah is its observance”. In Kurzweil’s opinion, the founders of the Wissenschaft des Judentums through a Hegelian dialectic reached the same conclusions as Sabbetaian and Frankist nihilism, from desiring the destruction of the rabbinate to encouraging the hope of a secular Messianism. Scholem yielded up the fate of Jewry to history and philology. Kurzweil’s criticisms bore an extraordinary similarity to Nietzsche’s. According to Nietzsche, the historiography of the nineteenth century caused a secularization of the idea of the “day of judgement” through the notion of progress, which aimed to liberate man from the shackles of his God by means of a rational consciousness extended over time.56 Nietzsche pointed out the paradoxical result of this process: man, who liberated himself from theological history, put his trust in secular historicism as new redeeming god. Religious salvation was replaced by a secular salvation whose

234  Nietzsche in the Holy Land new idol was now history and the idea of progress. Historiography, as man’s consciousness of himself, turned like a golem on its maker: man, who invented historiography in order to discover significance in history, ended by finding himself dominated by it. History had become the heir to God and the cult of historicism had taken the place of theology. Nietzsche saw historicism as a “disguised theology”, which science, as a secular church believing in an objective truth, used as a modern replacement for the Christian need to believe in the truth of the One God. The cult of historicism, in Kurzweil’s opinion, repressed living Judaism, the intellectual games of secular Messianism took the place of prayer. Scholem’s statement in his article “Reflections on the Wissenschaft des Judentums” that “we came to rebel and found ourselves continuing” was mischievously elaborated on by Kurzweil who said that we have continued burying Judaism and paying a high price for Messianism. The Science of Judaism, the continuation of Wissenschaft des Judentums, celebrated the rite of extinction, the rite of scientific facts alien to religious experience. This is the very phenomenon that Nietzsche criticized, and Kurzweil adopted his criticism: “The problems that Nietzsche set before his contemporaries still exist”.57 The desire is revealed to give a sacred aura to Jewish historical and philological research, the starting-point of which is the space that appears with the destruction of religious faith.58 Kurzweil’s starting-point was Nietzsche’s rejection of historical culture and general historical learning. They were totally rejected because they represented every event and human or social phenomenon as a product of history: the images and historical perspectives of all times and places used for the purposes of instruction, comparison, and explanation, stifled creative spontaneity. Historical learning taught one to see everything as a chain of development in which every action, initiative, impulse, movement, idea, and culture was explained and understood solely as a historical phenomenon, with the result that historical learning lost its independence. A general historical approach finally led to a devaluation; to a misrepresentation of the authentic, unique experience; and to a loss of the sense of the specific weight of each human phenomenon.59 The new man who would carry out a revolution of values in historical culture was the model which Nietzsche aspired to.60 History, for this new man as yet unborn, serves as a laboratory for life: on the one hand, the individual understands himself by means of history, and, on the other, he rejects the exaggerated use of it as something paralyzing and emasculating. The consciousness of chaos, which paralyzes others, stirs the new man to opposition and activity rather than to skepticism and indifference. His worth is tested by the amount of truth he is capable of bearing: he accepts the metaphysical truth of the meaninglessness of life, yet paradoxically he affirms life in practice. The hallmark of his greatness is the amount of history he is able to take without the vitality of his personality being impaired, and his ability to assimilate his historical consciousness into his life in such a way that it is strengthened. These statements were not only aggressive towards Christianity: according to Kurzweil, the word “Judaism” was emptied of its original meaning, and into that empty space there entered a completely new meaning opposed to that known to

The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit  235 the believing Jew. Kurzweil acknowledged that “Nietzsche was right when he said that ‘religion, when subjected to scientific facts, is destroyed at the end of the road’ ”.61 Science voids religion of its content. The religious significance of halachic Judaism is destroyed by modern research and science, which is beyond values. Scientific scholars of Judaism are like gynecological surgeons who are unable to understand love or the erotic as poets and lovers understand them. These scholars cannot be spokesmen for Judaism because it has ceased to represent for them a binding religious framework with commandants and prohibitions. Just as an anarchist cannot be an interpreter of the law, so a religious anarchist  – and Scholem was a self-confessed religious anarchist  – cannot be a spokesman for Judaism: “The anarchistic basis of Gershom Scholem’s teachings is the key to his historical and historiographical approach”.62 Scholem’s anarchism found its refuge in Zionism, while the anarchism of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno turned towards Marxism. Scholem’s starting-point was anarchismfor-anarchism’s-sake, rebellion-for-rebellion’s-sake, or, in other words, nihilism. A religious anarchist “knows that Judaism is far more than a subject for historical research”.63 Kurzweil found three contradictions – the same as Scholem discovered in the Wissenschaft des Judentums – in Scholem himself and in the Science of Judaism. The first was that between his pretension to scientific objectivity and his political outlook, a contradiction that stemmed from Scholem’s adherence to the Science of Judaism and to secular Hebrew nationalism. Scholem became the historiographer of the modern secular interpretation of Zionism, a political Messianism that was taken down from heaven to earth. The second contradiction was that between an intellectual and a romantic orientation, a contradiction characteristic of both Scholem and the Science of Judaism, whose positions were opposed to that of Walter Benjamin. Scholem tried to convert Benjamin to his subjective outlook despite the fact that in his opinion there was very little affinity with Judaism in his writings. Benjamin did not share in Scholem’s flight into historicism, into romantic Zionism, mysticism, and philology. The third contradiction was the profound discordance between the preservative and destructive character of science. The Science of Judaism brought the Messiah down to earth and thrust “the eternal infinite longing into the Procrustean bed of the dwarfish here-and-now”.64 The Wissenschaft des Judentums, according to Kurzweil, played a destructive role because it helped to identify the State of Israel with the people of Israel and the Science of Judaism with Judaism itself. Kurzweil said, “Nietzsche rightly warned against [. . .] a tendency ‘to worship the idol of fact’, whose embodiment today is the state”.65 This was a Nietzschean idea he regarded as still relevant: And he who bows down to the “power of history” will bow his head [. . .] to any power [. . .] Just look at the religion of the power of history: beware of the priests of the mythology of ideas!66 The Scholem-type “religion of the power of history” repelled Kurzweil. Nietzsche was also distrustful of the power of history. According to him, the study of history

236  Nietzsche in the Holy Land was for the purpose of the intensification of life: the study of monumental history showed that the historical greatness which had once been possible could be possible again; the study of antiquarian history gave a degree of importance to the trivia of life as well; and critical history incriminated the past in order to justify the present in process of formation. Nietzsche regarded historical culture as a sickness, and his categorical classification of history was proposed as a cure whose prescription was history in the service of life. The enlightenment of the Greeks was proposed as a cure for the sickness of the German study of history. The former, according to Nietzsche, represented an authentic, pluralistic, and harmonious culture, while the latter symbolized decadence, monopolism, and dichotomy. The dichotomy between life and history was expressed in historicism, sympathetic to a historical culture which did not serve any purpose except for decoration and selfadornment, and which harmed a people’s cultural system and led to the alienation of the individual. The assimilation of the individual into general molds of insipid and sterile historical knowledge turned human beings into uniform products devoid of personal character (HL5). History became a kind of oracle for the historical man who placed his trust in it. Instead of personal experience there was abundant illusion, consciousness alienated the experiential, the mania for knowledge created paralysis, self-criticism disappeared, and impotence took the place of self-overcoming. Armed with the weapons Nietzsche employed against historicism, Kurzweil depicted Scholem’s general strategy. Apart from Scholem’s scientific aspirations, Kurzweil detected a present-day significance in the historiography of Sabbetai Sevi. In Kurzweil’s opinion, it was the intention of giving the secular interpretation of Judaism, as it existed in the period of secular Zionism, validity as the continuation of traditional Judaism. If that was so, then the attempt to confer legitimacy on secularism was not the result of a process of secularization, which began with the Haskalah. Secularism, in Kurzweil’s interpretation of Scholem, was the result of the disintegration of the Jewish faith in its traditional form through mysticism, Kabbala, Messianic movements; Sabbetaianism; and Frankism. This form of Judaism through a dialectical process gave birth to secularism. Scholem, continued Kurzweil, enlisted the “science of history” for his anarchical purpose of destroying halachic Judaism and promoting the ideology of a secular Jewish state: Scholem is the first great Jewish scholar who with a flair of genius adopted a seemingly mystical position [. . .] a nihilistic mysticism or a mystical nihilism, in order to catapult the “abnormal Jew” at halachic rabbinic Judaism [. . .]. The anarchist’s target is halachic Judaism, his weapons mystical texts. There is no more convincing proof of the absurdity of our period than the fact that it is precisely Scholem who is today the spokesman of Judaism!67 When the masks of “historical objectivity” and “philological exactitude” are removed, said Kurzweil, one sees the trap in which Judaism is ensnared through the Jungian psychology of the abyss. Scholem, famous representative of the

The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit  237 Science of Judaism, completed the work begun by the Wissenschaft des Judentums. Scholem ignited an anarchistic dialectic, explosive material loaded with Jewish mysticism, seeking in this way to blow up halachic Judaism. That is how Scholem’s researches found acceptance in the Eranos circle for the study of myth founded by Jung.68 Kurzweil drew attention to the chasm that exists between the approach of Judaism and the Jungian outlook. Even in Jewish mysticism, there is an infinite discrepancy between the divine transcendence and the Jewish immanence, but Jung does not recognize this discrepancy and creates a theology without God, a nihilistic world-view (in contrast to Freud) that ignores morality. This is the inner logic of the nihilism of venerating amoral myths which provided an anchor for Nazi totalitarianism. The Wissenschaft des Judentums found an academic home in Jung’s teachings.69 Is psychology able to plumb the depths of religious experience? Jungian psychology, unlike Freudian, claims that the religious phenomenon is purely subjective. Scholem used psychology to understand the personality of Sabbetai Sevi, but only insofar that this was in accordance with his own assumptions: “In the hour of need he allows no entry to rational analysis and zealously protects the sanctity of the kingdom of myth and mystery”.70 Scholem’s diagnosis of Sabbetai Sevi as manic-depressive was considered dubious by Kurzweil who, for his part, suggested an extreme schizophrenia, a sort of sick spiritual dialectic causing a loss of sense of reality and disintegration of the personality. It follows that many of the actions of Sabbetai Sevi were not signs of “illumination” but simply of madness, insanity which bears witness to the loss of personality. Kurzweil’s conclusion was, “Sabbetai Sevi was not a revolutionary and not a social reformer, just as he was not a Messiah or a political leader. He was a sick man who suffered from a loss of the sense of reality”.71 If this was the case, Sabbetai Sevi was a lunatic who radiated around him demonic energies which stirred up collective psychoses. Instead of the dialectical explanation given by Scholem, Kurzweil proposed seeing the Sabbetaian movement as a collective psychosis. And so it came about that Kurzweil, who asked, “If he [Scholem] was entitled to construct a historiography that depended entirely on acts of insanity”, did the same with regard to psychiatric phenomena in the light of which he claimed to have direct knowledge of a historical personage without the professional proficiency required for this purpose. After he had given his own psychological explanation, he said that “a psychological explanation not only does not add anything, it destroys; moreover, it is absurd”.72 And Kurzweil immediately retracted that general conclusion as well, as being invalid with regard to the Sabbetaian movement: There is no creation here, but only destruction. There is no greatness, but only weakness. There is no beauty but only ugliness. There is no growth and spiritual development but only degeneracy and rottenness. Here there is no social construction on a healthy basis, there are no social reforms and there is certainly no revolution, but disintegration, the growth of a social cancer, social infection. And as always in cases of degeneracy, missing here is

238  Nietzsche in the Holy Land the outstanding sign of natural and healthy organic growth: there is no great work, and, in place of it, visions of madness, the spread of the spiritual miasmas known as Sabbetaian literature, the rule of demonology.73 Kurzweil wished “to warn of the destructive danger of the fashion for mysticism”. Too much preoccupation with Kabbala authorizes moral relativism and nihilistic theology: sanctity becomes trauma and “the good has to be transformed into absolute evil [. . .] so that evil will burst from within”.74 With this perverted dialectic, “there is no contemptible, base, immoral, inhuman action that cannot be justified by cliptology”. In this way, the Messiah becomes some kind of Nietzschean Übermensch, beyond good and evil. Drawing an analogy with Messianic manifestations among other peoples – and here, of course, he was hinting at the totalitarian figures and movements of the twentieth century – Kurzweil suggested that similar phenomena among the Jewish people should be treated with suspicion, and even if esoteric, should not be described with sympathy and affection. Kurzweil’s analogy resembles the parallel made by Buber between Jacob Frank and Hitler. Likewise, among historians, such as Isaac Jost, Leopold Zunz, and Heinrich Graetz, Judaism was an object of criticism and research, and at the same time, it was an opportunity to clarify the meaning of existence and define one’s identity. They saw the war against rabbinic Judaism as their chief aim, urged the Jews to leave the exile, and did not distinguish at first between the problem of the Jews and the problem of Judaism. Their critical approach was compared by Kurzweil to “what Nietzsche called the third way of seeing the past, the critical way (as against the monumental and antiquarian ways)”.75 He further quoted Nietzsche, who said, Man needs the courage from time to time to shatter the past in order that he can live. He does this by summoning it before the seat of judgement [. . .]. The whole of the past deserves to be found guilty.76 The critical approach that Ganz called for in the Science of Judaism and Nietzsche called for in historiography was far from the Science of Judaism that in Kurzweil’s opinion worshiped “facts” in order to serve “spoiled idlers in the garden of knowledge”, to use Nietzsche’s expression. Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history” was enlisted by Kurzweil to criticize the idea of progress in the Science of Judaism, a belief in progress cultivated by the  philosophy of the eighteenth century and developed by the historiography of the nineteenth. By jettisoning the authority of the One God, normative morality, systematic reason and objective truth, Nietzsche sought with his “philosophical hammer” to reveal the concept of progress in its theological nakedness. Nietzsche was one of the first thinkers to reveal the illusions of progress. In an especially sarcastic move, Kurzweil thrust the dagger of historicism into Scholem and chose to do it in the place where it hurt most  – using a weapon from the armory of Scholem’s good friend Benjamin.

The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit  239 The angel of history, following Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (new angel), was shown by Benjamin to have tired eyes, a gaping mouth, and stiff wings.77 This was Jewish history, which had lost its meaning with the death of religious faith: a storm had appeared in place of tranquility and a logical sequence of events. The past was like a heap of ruins, and there was no hope of repairing what was broken. But the illusion did not end there: it decreed that hope would come from emancipation, from history itself, from the Enlightenment’s angel of progress. But, as we know, a terrible price was paid for the illusion of history, the storm of progress. With a final thrust of the dagger, Kurzweil declared, “Benjamin’s words ought to serve as a warning to his friend Scholem”.78 However, Kurzweil claimed that his learned friend from Jerusalem forgot the terrible appearance of the Angelus Novus when he set out on his path of historicism, philology, resurrection of myth, and a Jungian outlook. Scholem, said Kurzweil, continuing his line of thought, transformed Benjamin’s criticism of historicism into a criticism of his own of rabbinic Judaism. Just as Benjamin thought of cutting off historical continuity, so Scholem considered the possibility of breaking the continuity of classical Judaism by means of Kabbala and mysticism. Scholem attached great importance to the myth that came to life in the framework of Kabbala.

Theology without God In the “Theology without God”, myth played a key role. It did not communicate a certain content, ideology, or religion, but only itself.79 It was myth ex nihilo; thus, according to Kurzweil, the Science of Judaism blossomed in the flowerbeds of nihilism. Like Ernst Cassirer, the philosopher of symbolic forms, Kurzweil feared “the mobilization of myth for political ends”, as myths remove the restraints of rational criticism and throw wide open the gates of the irrational. Myth is liable to be a substitute reality.80 Kurzweil warned precisely of this, for myth, he said, “Is not the ‘reality of realities’, the revelation of a higher reality”. Like Cassirer, he distinguished between the role of the symbol in myth and its role in science: science recognizes its symbolic character, but in myth, it is not aware of itself as a symbol. Science is an adaptation of reality and not a higher form of it as myth sees itself.81 The absence of a critical attitude to myth can lead to “a very dangerous interplay with the demonic”. Kurzweil recognized the difference between the religious man who lives in a mythical dimension and the nihilist who relates to myth in a purely intellectual way: while in Benjamin the aim was moral, humanistic, and constructive, and the intention was to implement a universal secular Messianism, Scholem’s aim was a narrow national Messianism.82 Scholem, said Kurzweil, broke historical continuity in favor of individual anarchy and so paved the way for a demonic and nihilistic regime. Judaism became a pile of trash and a heap of ruins. One should remember, said Kurzweil, in this anticipating of contemporary Kabbala scholars like Moshe Idel and Yehuda Libes, that monotheistic myth gave a revolutionary meaning both to myth and to morality.83 The question that arises is this: in what

240  Nietzsche in the Holy Land circumstances is myth vital and productive, and in what circumstances is it a dangerous drug liable to lead to a disaster? The issue raised here bears an extraordinary resemblance to Joseph Haim Jerushalmi’s observation: Myth and memory work together. There are myths that sustain life, and these are worthy of being reinterpreted for the needs of our period. Others are liable to lead one astray, and they need to be redefined; still others are dangerous and should be vomited out.84 But while Jerushalmi distinguished between different kinds of myth, Kurzweil warned against the danger of myth per se: Myth is not the ultimate reality, the revelation of a higher truth. Modern man flirts with myth outside the framework of normative religious life: which means that anarchistic-individualistic yearnings and the temptation of irrational myth reflect a presumptuous desire, a very dangerous play with the demonic.85 In Scholem, one finds “a tendency to positive appraisal of irrational mythical factors. There is also a certain sympathy in describing developments which are really a potentially dangerous revival of nihilistic myths and irrational, destructive, beyond-ethical phenomena”.86 Kurzweil explained the danger of the triangular relationship between relativity of values, nihilism, and an escape to myth: In the demonic encounter of the logos and nihilistic myth, one finds the “psychology of the chasm” which winks forgivingly and knows that in any case there is no room for absolute values. All is relative, everything fluctuates and changes, and there is but one source from which the soul draws from the depths. The main thing is that we have revealed the structure of the archetype.87 And the structure was messianic myth. One of the basic meanings is bringing down the Messianic myth from the heavenly city to the political vale of tears. Although, Kurzweil continued, Scholem warned of “the price of Messianism”,88 his statements were always two-sided, yes and no: Yes, the Jewish people paid too dearly for the Messianic idea, but since it has paid now, one must direct the yearnings of the people, which took the form of the construction of a higher reality, to the acceptable goal of a secular redemption.89 This being the case, Scholem abandoned logic for myth: a critical perspective was exchanged for a zealous protection of the irrational, of myth, of the mysterious. Kurzweil’s aim, like that of the biblical project Yehezkiel Kaufmann undertook, was to put myth beyond the pale. The danger was not a theoretical but an actual

The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit  241 one: a political play with the doctrine of nitzotzot and clipot was liable to lead to a nihilistic theology. After the Holocaust, said Kurzweil, there was a revision in Scholem’s thinking and he began a revaluation of Judaism as he realized that the anti-rabbinic rebellion did not solve any problems. One is surprised at this statement, as in 1957, 12  years after the Holocaust ended, Scholem, in his biography Sabbetai Sevi, described an anti-rabbinic rebellion in a sympathetic way. Kurzweil explained that Scholem’s despair of Judaism and Zionism made him shut himself up in the ivory tower of “pure science”, which, like “pure poetry”, is in the “exile of nothingness”. “Even Nietzsche, the father of all modern aesthetes, knew this”. In many ways, Scholem’s investigation of the Sabbetaian episode was a testcase for Kurzweil’s discussion of how the Science of Judaism helped or harmed Judaism. He began by praising Scholem for his scholarly work, which, though not purely professional, scrupulously followed the methods of professional research. It was a work that demonstrated expertise, a total mastery of sources, an eye for the significant, and the literary abilities of a great writer. But there was a fly in the ointment: the sheer brilliance, the flashes of paradox spoiled everything: the intellectual fireworks distorted the historical perspective. The too-radical conclusions, the basic assumptions went too far. For instance, sweeping assertions like positing a development “from nihilism as a religious position based on the sources of the religion itself to the new world of the Haskalah”.90 This was the basic assumption of the article “Redemption Through Sin”, which served as the “conceptual and historiographical skeleton” of the major work Sabbetai Sevi. Kurzweil’s chief claim was that Scholem’s historiography relied too much on the example of the Sabbetaian movement: in other words, the test-case was too radical, too exceptional to bear witness to the general rule, although the character of the Sabbetaian movement was from the beginning the basic ideological belief underlying Scholem’s historical philosophy. Every ideology has a philosophy of history, and vice versa: tell me what your philosophy of history is, and I will tell you what ideology you adhere to. Kurzweil said that a Zionist interpretation of history was not the final destination of Scholem’s researches, because Scholem was sufficiently intelligent not to impress upon Judaism only the Zionist political idea. Scholem felt that an exaggerated esteem for the state was his original sin, and with this danger of “idolatry of the state” he had relegated Judaism to the sphere of myth. Kurzweil’s searching question on this subject remains valid: “Is the Science of Judaism the history of the history of mythology?”91 According to Scholem, the classical Jewish tradition was largely anti-mythical, and Kurzweil identified in Scholem’s outlook a gnostic and mythical tendency at the heart of which was a religious anarchism directed first and foremost against halacha. Martin Buber, likewise, did not accept the sanctity of the scientific method, but he was possessed of an anarchic religiosity, whereas “the anarchistic principle in Scholem chose precisely Judaism, as a normative religion, as its field of activity. First there was the anarchistic motive, not the religious one. In Buber the religious motive determined his path”.92

242  Nietzsche in the Holy Land And indeed, “all criticism of Sabbetai Sevi worthy of the name must make us confront anew the historical concept expressed in the article ‘Redemption Through Sin’ ”. The task of criticism, according to Kurzweil, was to reveal the means employed by Scholem in using historical facts in order to justify his view of Judaism and Jewish history. What we have is “a perspective fixed in advance”, which is different from an account of the Sabbetaian movement, and which offered a revolutionary philosophy of Jewish history. Kurzweil thought that although Scholem’s investigations were an important undertaking in that they brought a breath of fresh air to professional historical approaches to Judaism, their main fault was that in their subordination to a contemporary ideology they were not concerned with objective historical truth. Kurzweil’s astute criticism of Gershom Scholem was intended to reveal the political theology of the greatest twentieth-century scholar of Judaism in his writings. The picture of the past portrayed by Scholem with the hand of an artist was according to Kurzweil not a different historiography of Sabbetaianism but a new historiography of Judaism. There was an exaggeration of the importance of the Sabbetaian test-case and consequently “an irrational and demonic blurring of judgement”.93 Scholem set out to prove that there was no single dogmatic line in Judaism and became a defender of its dynamic relativity. In this, he brought to a conclusion a way of thinking initiated by Berdichevsky more than a hundred years before, according to which Judaism does not have an “essence” but only an “existence” – that is to say, it is as variegated as the items it contains. This basic assumption, said Kurzweil, inevitably led to a relativization, a transvaluation of values: “There is no terrible, paradoxical, immoral and inhuman action that cannot be justified by this means”.94 It is not surprising that Kurzweil spoke of Scholem and Berdichevsky in the same breath. Already in his classic essay “The Character and Sources of the ‘Young Hebrews’ Movement [Canaanites]” he had identified Berdichevsky and the Tse’irim as the progenitors of the “Hebrew” interpretation of Judaism, as forerunners of Canaanism and as those who paved the way for secular Zionism. He expected that this relativism, which gave validity to secularism and Canaanism (including the “Canaanite Messianism”), would finally be given justification. Kurzweil, who said that understanding a dialectical process was tantamount to justifying it, maintained that, in the final analysis, Scholem had a positive opinion of the Sabbetaian episode. Moreover Scholem, in his opinion, saw the Sabbetaian Messianic movement as one “of the turning-points that determined our fate”. Again, in his article “Redemption Through Sin”,95 Scholem tried to convince us that the secular Zionist realization of the idea of redemption and Messianism was the outcome of historical development: “Consciously or unconsciously, Scholem became the historiographer of the modern secular interpretation of the Zionist movement, of the Messianism of the here-and-now, which had been brought down from its heavenly abode to the domain of earthly politics”.96 Someone who did not regard the Sabbetaian movement as a case of degeneration, a collective pathological spiritual phenomenon among a small section of the people, but as a kind of “change of heart” in the entire people (“transvaluation of values” in Nietzsche’s

The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit  243 terminology) leading directly to the Haskalah, the secularization of the Jew and the rise of Zionism, was bound to have a favorable opinion of this Messianic movement. But, in Kurzweil’s opinion, behind the mask of this Messianism of the here-and-now there lurked a “nihilistic theology”97: A situation arises and someone is considered a Messiah. He does not use the traditional theology but a theology of nihilism which according to Scholem has continually developed straight from Sabbataianism. And behold, he will do whatever he wants with the Jewish people! This man can in no small measure take his stand on Scholem’s work, through a “dialectical development” from faith in Sabbetai Sevi to the religious nihilism of Sabbetaianism and Frankism, to a teaching that shakes Judaism to its core – “the annulment of the Torah is its observance”. Anything becomes possible [. . .]. Perhaps (but I am convinced of it) that in a certain sense Scholem’s books were consciously or unconsciously written, despite everything, for theological reasons. That is to say, they possess strong elements of nihilistic theology.98 In the historiographical positions he adopted, Kurzweil was strongly influenced by the German philosopher Karl Löwith.99 Gershom Scholem likewise, declared Kurzweil, taking his cue from Löwith, said that a new Zionist history had to be created in place of the old religious history.100 The meaning of the secular Hebrew revival, from Berdichevsky to Scholem, was the annihilation of Judaism through the adoption of Nietzschean values. Zionism, as a “return to history”, to use Scholem’s expression, works against the a-historical principle of Judaism.101 The controversy between Scholem and Kurzweil was really a controversy between a historian who wished by scientific means to investigate a historical phenomenon, as Kurzweil called it, such as Judaism, and a philosopher of history or cultural critic.

The political theology of Zionism About six years after the appearance of his article on nihilism, Karl Löwith wrote an article, “Meaning in History”, in which he warned of the distortion of the concept of progress. The concept of progress, in his opinion, was a secular transvaluation of eschatological ideas, seeing that modernism and secularism were a new clothing for more traditional concepts. Following him, Kurzweil crystallized his blatantly anti-historical position, which had deep roots in the German philosophy of history.102 According to this, historical facts and normative values are opposing categories, and one can therefore have no faith in scholarly analyzes. Secular Jewish nationalism, which Kurzweil saw as a special kind of political theology, deliberately alienated itself from the a-historical nature of Judaism. Although he supported Zionism, he maintained that one must recognize the dialectical character of both nationhood and religion: national sovereignty empties Judaism of its values and swallows up what remains of it. The entry of Judaism into the circle of nations likewise obliterates the spiritual vocation of the Jewish people. The

244  Nietzsche in the Holy Land religious essence of Judaism, which is spiritual and moral, gives way to nationalism, secularism, and modernity. The meaning is loss of religious concepts like netzah Israel and tsur Israel, which were now only seen in a national context, a context alien to the timeless religious essence of Judaism. The political theology of Zionism reached its climax in the transformation of the Messianic idea into a political entity: The territorial Messianism had achieved its aims. The heavenly Messianism had come down to earth. It was almost a proof of the complete legitimacy of Zionism’s claim to be continuation and the living and life-giving actualization of Judaism. The ancient myths at the heart of Judaism – and in the form of their rational reworking as well – had become a historical actuality. The soldiers who captured the Wall were truly like dreamers. Breaking into the Old City and conquering it were extra-temporal manifestations. The “now” was also the past; the past was identical with the future. A synoptic vision united them all. Divine historicity, which is meta-historical, and normal, secular historicity, the product of time, seemed to melt into one another and become as one, and there were consequently many who spoke of a religious revival. There was clearly a blurring of distinctions [.  .  .]. The distinction between sacred and profane was obliterated. From now on, everything was sacred or could be sacred.103 Without the religious character of Judaism, it was difficult for Kurzweil to see anything special in the Jewish phenomenon. “What will later be our specific national claim, what will remain to us except for folklore, what will signify our essence apart from the Hebrew language?”104 Kurzweil thought there was no escaping the adoption of a clear position, even if it was the Canaanite one, for that was the reality emerging in Israel, a reality in which there was no place for netzah Israel or tsur Israel. In his opinion, Jewish nationhood was bankrupt: there was no particularity or significance in a secular state. David Ben-Gurion reacted to these ideas in a letter to Kurzweil in 1961. He said that he agreed with Kurzweil’s criticisms but not with his basic assumptions. He did not accept Rosenzweig’s and Kurzweil’s belief that Judaism was meta-historical and outside time. He said about himself that “I am not a Zionist and not a nationalist but a Jew”,105 and in his opinion, the source of Judaism was the history of the Jewish people. Moses, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, Rabbi Akiva, and Rabbi Yehuda Halevi were not “nationalist” or “Zionist”, and these words did not mean anything to him: “Where I am concerned, the concept ‘Jew’ says it all”.106 In his reply to Ben-Gurion, Kurzweil protested against the concept “Jewish nationhood”, which he felt distorted the special character of the people of Israel. Judaism was not the same as its simplistic interpretation by modern secular nationalism, which was the heart and soul of “vulgar Zionism”. His historiographical approach could be summed up in the assertion that “the state cannot be the highest, the decisive value, but only God”.107 One cannot know the special quality of Jewish

The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit  245 history without the dimension of religious faith. With the rise of secularism, the ancient Jewish historiosophy became a myth that had grown obsolete, “and in the absence of faith it is very dangerous to give oneself up to the impure pursuit of a mythical dream”. However, the crux of the matter was: “The one thing I want is that there should be a clear distinction between the sacred and secular spheres, and that sacred concepts should not be used to sanctify secular ones”.108 In 1965, he again expressed his “dissatisfaction with all sorts of high-flown nationalist attempts to use religious concepts and religious values to camouflage the political aims of secularism”. Behind this idea of compartmentalizing the religious and the political there lay a Protestant approach. Kurzweil sought to anchor his religiosity through a protection of the secular sphere, and this was only possible if the secular was not sanctified. Deep religious obligation is pre-eminently Protestant because belief in the transcendence of God is a Protestant characteristic. Kurzweil saw secularization as a slippery slope descending to the swamp of nihilism. He feared that what would be left would be emptiness, and therefore accepted a compartmentalization in order not to allow secularism to dominate religion, for there could be no Jewishness without the Jewish religion. By means of this compartmentalization, this division of spheres between sacred and secular, Kurzweil sought to make the secular world rational, in that it would be open to investigation and criticism.109 As a follower of the neo-Kantian tradition, he wanted a Judaism free from the restraints of matter and materialism. This was the Protestant ideal of a religion free from myths: if we rid ourselves of the fetishes of symbolism in this country, only practical questions will remain. As a result, he did not see the landscape of his homeland as an ancestral legacy, vestiges of Canaanism associated with a fetishistic sort of Judaism. He felt that the combination of what he called “the Messianism of the here-and-now” and old-new Canaanism, of anticipating the coming of the Messiah and the sanctification of the state, portended disaster.110 The Six-Day War, in Kurzweil’s opinion, exposed to the light of day the danger of blurring the boundaries between the religious and the political and of suppressing the distinction between Messianic time and historical time. The historiographical interpretation of Judaism that led to secular Jewish nationalism came to an end in 1967, the year regarded as ushering in the final stage of redemption in the Messianic phase of Zionism. Zionism and its daughter, the State of Israel, which had reached the Wall through military conquest as the realization of the earthly Messianism, could never forsake the Wall and abandon the conquered areas of the Land of Israel without estranging itself from its historiosphical understanding of Judaism. Practical Zionism was caught in the web of its achievements. Abandoning them would be to admit its failure as the representative and agent of the historical continuity of Judaism [.  .  .]. It could not be that the gallop of the Messianic apocalypse could be held up in order to permit the passengers to get out and look at the spectacular scenery of the Day of the Lord [. . .]. The

246  Nietzsche in the Holy Land blowing of the ram’s horn by all the Chief Rabbis next to the Wall will not change anything and from now on it will simply be a magical rite. Similarly, there cannot be a beginning of redemption at a time when full redemption is achieved and abandoned.111 As many people saw it, the Messianic euphoria following the war revealed the metaphysical dialectic underlying the secular state: Messianic eschatology received its final endorsement from the Israeli nation which with its legions had liberated Judea and Samaria, and at the same time, national secularism took off into transcendental spheres that hastened the end of the secular entity. The war was the final and decisive proof of the ambition of Zionism to take the place of Judaism. Because the secular Messiah could not retreat, he paid the price for the attempt to replace Judaism with nationalism alone. Zionism’s disguise of historical Messianism, exposed for a short time in the war, covered the nakedness of the historical rupture. Henceforth, it was impossible for the historicization of Judaism to disguise itself as a continuity and for secular history to deck itself out as religious Messianism.112 This was how Kurzweil represented the nakedness of Israeli mamlachtiut (statism) that sought to inherit the religious essence of Judaism. The conquest of parts of the homeland was the final act of the nationalsecular redemption. Kurzweil exposed this “Messianism of the land” whose motif was the conquest of parts of the country and whose neo-Canaanite roots were intertwined with the literature of the Hebrew revival. The beginning of this trend was the construction of the “new Hebrew” alienated from the historical continuity of his people – a religious, not a historical continuity, a continuity based on the metaphysical “Place”, the Jewish epithet for God, not on the physical place, parts of the land of Israel. The Six-Day War was for Kurzweil the bursting of the underground dam of the secular Zionist religion. The inherent contradictions of that political Messianism surfaced in 1967, and thus the war was the final realization of embryonic Zionist thought. The hidden contradictions between sacred and profane, between the transcendental and the immanent, between religion and politics were now clearly exposed. In the union of opposites that was suddenly revealed, the kingdom of heaven fused with the terrestrial hosts, the city of God with the scene below. Indeed, “Berdichevsky’s hope had now become a reality”. His Nietzsche-inspired “new Hebrew” had fulfilled his mission and a “Canaanite Messianism” came to pass in actual fact. Baruch Kurzweil, the Orthodox thinker from Bar-Ilan, was alarmed at the Nietzschean “heretical religiosity” from Berdichevsky to Scholem which led to a “Hebrew” interpretation of Judaism and a political theology of Zionism, and then to the territorial Messianism of the Greater Land of Israel. Israel Eldad proposed an opposite interpretation. Eldad, secular and a nationalist, the translator of Nietzsche into Hebrew, gave the German thinker a Canaanite-Greek interpretation, an interpretation that revealed a Hellenistic, conciliatory and humanistic Nietzsche who belonged to the philosophical tradition of “thinkers who state problems” rather than “thinkers who provide solutions”.

The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit  247

Notes 1 Baruch Kurzweil, “The Influence of Lebensphilosophie on Hebrew Literature at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century”, Our New Literature – Continuation or Revolution? Jerusalem and Tel Aviv 1965. [Hebrew]. 2 Ibid., 228. 3 Ibid., 229. 4 Boaz Arpeli, ed., Saul Tchernikovsky: Studies and Testimonies, Jerusalem 1995. [Hebrew]; Abraham Shanaan, Saul Tchernikovsky, monograph, Tel Aviv 1983 [Hebrew]; and see especially, Kurzweil, Bialik and Tchernikovsky: Researches in Their Poetry, Tel Aviv 1972. [Hebrew]. 5 Shlomo Pines, “Nietzsche: Psychology vs. Philosophy”, in Yirmiyahu Yovel, ed., Nietzsche as an Affirmative Thinker, Dordrecht 1986, 147–159. 6 Kurzweil, “The Influence of Lebensphilosophie”, 229. 7 Ibid., 230. 8 Ohana, The Dawn of Political Nihilism, 13–53. 9 Kurzweil, “The Influence of Lebensphilosophie”, 230. 10 Ibid., 232. 11 Ibid., 230. 12 Ibid., 231. 13 Ibid., 237. 14 Zalman Shneur, “I Have Understood”, Works, Tel Aviv 1960. [Hebrew]. 15 Yosef Chaim Brenner, Works, IV, Tel Aviv 1986, 1646. [Hebrew]. 16 Kurzweil, “The Influence of Lebensphilosophie”, 239. 17 Joseph Klausner, Saul Tchernikovsky, the Man and the Poet, Jerusalem 1953, 63. [Hebrew]; idem., Creaters and Builders – Critical Articles II, Jerusalem 1930, 189, 192. [Hebrew]; Benzion Benshalom, “Greek Motifs in the Poetry of Tchernikovsky”, The Ways of Creativity – Essays and Articles, Tel Aviv 1966, 75–104. [Hebrew]; Hillel Barzel, “Against the Heritage: From the Visions of a False Prophet”, The Poetry of the Hebrew Revival: Saul Tchernikovsky, 81–82, 87, 97, Tel Aviv 1992, 439. [Hebrew]. 18 Hillel Barzel, “Nietzschean Motifs in the Poetry of Tchernikovsky”, in Jacob Golomb, ed., Nietzsche in Hebrew Culture, Jerusalem 2002, 181–218. [Hebrew]. 19 Benzion Benshalom, “Greek Motifs in the Poetry of Tchernikovsky”. 20 Kurzweil, “The Influence of Lebensphilosophie”, 240. 21 Ibid., 242. 22 Ohana, The Role of Myth in History: Nietzsche and Sorel, Religion, Ideology and Nationalism in Europe and America, Jerusalem 1986, 119–140. 23 Berdichevsky, letter to Y. Shkapaniuk, 1893, Nechzarim, A/24. [Hebrew]. 24 Avner Holtzman, Towards the Tear in the Heart: Micha Josef Berdyczewsky – The Formative Years (1886–1902), Jerusalem 1995, 58. [Hebrew]. 25 Berdichevsky, Diary Chapters, trans. Rachel Ben-Gurion, Tel Aviv 1975. [Hebrew]. 26 Berdichevsky, “Changes”, Arachim (Values), Warsaw 1900, 59. [Hebrew]. 27 Berdichevsky, “Al-Ha-achdut” (“On Unity”), In the Middle of the Road, Warsaw 1902, 67 [Hebrew]. 28 Berdichevsky, “On the Way”, I, 64. [Hebrew]., 29 Berdichevsky, “On Nature”, In the Middle of the Road, 14. 30 Kurzweil, “Jewish Nationalism in Our Time”, in: David Ohana, Messianism and Mamlachtiut – Ben Gurion and the Intellectuals Between Political Vision and Political Theology, Sede Boker 2003, 358. [Hebrew]. 31 Kurzweil, “The Influence of Lebensphilosophie”, 243. 32 Ibid. 33 Holtzman, Towards the Tear in Heart. 34 Kurzweil, “The Nature and Origins of the ‘Young Hebrews’ (Canaanites)”, Our New Literature – Continuity or Revolution? 270–300. [Hebrew]; Dan Laor, “Kurzweil and

248  Nietzsche in the Holy Land

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

the Canaanites: Between Insight and Struggle”, Keshet – After 40 Years (1998): 32–45. [Hebrew]. Gershom Scholem in an interview with Ehud Ben Ezer, “Zionism  – A  Dialectic of Continuity and Revolt”, 38. Marcel Mauss, “Compte rendu de G. Dumézil. Le Festin d’immortalit”, L’Année sociologique, 1 (1925); David Pace, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes, London 1983. Danny Jacoby, ed., One Land, Two Peoples, Jerusalem 1999, 104. [Hebrew]. Samuel Hugo Bergman, “On the Formation of the Nation’s Character in Our State”, Ha-Poel Ha-Tzair, 26–27, 10 April 1949. [Hebrew]. Kurzweil, “Judaism as a Revelation of the National-Biological Will-to-Live”, Our New Literature – Continuity or Revolution? 193 [Hebrew]. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 206. Ibid., 212. Kurzweil, “The Influence of Lebensphilosophie”, 252. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 252. Ibid., 245. Ibid., 258–259. Ibid., 262. Ibid., 264–265. Kurzweil, “The Nature and Origins of the ‘Young Hebrews’ (‘Canaanites’)”, 287. Ibid. Dan Laor, “From ‘Hadrasha’ to Epistle to the Hebrew Youth”, Alpayim 21 (2001): 185. [Hebrew]. Anita Shapira, “What Happened to the Denial of the Exile?”, Alpayim 25 (2003): 9–54. [Hebrew]. Dan Laor, “Kurzweil and the Canaanites”, 32–45. Kurzweil quoting Nietzsche’s essay, On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life”, in Struggling for the Principles of Judaism, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv 1970, 184. [Hebrew]. Ohana, “The Nietzschean revolution”, The Dawn of Political Nihilism, 26–29. Kurzweil, “On the Use and Abuse of the Science of Judaism”, Struggling for the Principles of Judaism, 196. [Hebrew]. James C. O’Flaherty, Timothy F. Sellner and Robert M. Helm, eds., Studies in Nietzsche and Judaeo-Christian Tradition, London 1985. Nietzsche, On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, 8. Ibid., 6. Kurzweil, “On the Use and Abuse of the Science of Judaism”, 198. Kurzweil, “On the Limits of the Authority of History”, Struggling for the Values of Judaism, 173. Ibid. Kurzweil, “On the Use and Abuse of the Science of Judaism”, 203. Ibid. Ibid., 204. Kurzweil, “On the Use and Abuse of the Science of Judaism”, 211. Steven M. Wasserstorm, Religion After Religion; Josef Dan, On Gershom Scholem – Twelve Articles, Jerusalem 2010, 133–173. Kurzweil, “On the Use and Abuse of the Science of Judaism”, 233–234. Kurzweil, “Notes on Gershom Scholem’s Sabbetai Zevi”, Struggling for the Values of Judaism, 99–134. Ibid., 122.

The Nietzschean ethos and the Canaanite spirit  249 72 Ibid., 128. 73 Ibid., 188. 74 Scholem, Sabbatai Zevi, the Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676, revised English edition, trans. Z.R. Werblowsky, Princeton 1973. 75 Kurzweil, “On the Use and Abuse of the Science of Judaism”, 218. 76 James S. Diamond, Baruch Kurzweil and Modern Hebrew Literature, Chicago 1983; idem., The Literary Criticism of Baruch Kurzweil: A Study in Hebrew-European Literary Relationships, Bloomington 1978. 77 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Hannah Arendt, ed., Harry Zohn, trans., Illuminations, London 1973, 255–266; Gershom Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel”, in Gary Smith, ed., On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, Cambridge 1988; and see especially Noam Zadoff, “The Debate Between Baruch Kurzweil and Gershom Scholem on the Research of Sabbetaianism”, Kabbalah 16 (2007): 323–329. [Hebrew]. 78 Kurzweil, “On the Use and Abuse of the Science of Judaism”, 220. 79 Ohana, Homo Mythicus, 58–70, 95–105. 80 Kurzweil, “On the Use and Abuse of the Science of Judaism”, 229. 81 Ohana, “Preface”, Homo Mythicus, vi–viii. 82 Kurzweil, “On the Use and Abuse of the Science of Judaism”, 231–232. 83 Moshe Idel, Kabbala: New Perspectives, New Haven 1987; Yehuda Liebes, “De Natura Dei: on Jewish Myth and Its Development”, in Micha Oron and Amos Goldreich, eds., Massuot: Studies in the Literature of the Kabbala and in Jewish Philosophy, In Memory of Professor Efraim Gottlieb, Jerusalem 1994, 243–297. [Hebrew]. 84 Zakhor, Jewish History and Jewish Memory, essays in honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, New York 1989. 85 Kurzweil, “On the Use and Abuse of the Science of Judaism”, 229. 86 Kurzweil, “Notes on Gershom Scholem’s Sabbetai Zevi”, 111. 87 Ibid., 112. 88 Ohana, “J.L. Talmon, Gershom Scholem and the Price of Messianism”, 169–188. 89 Kurzweil, “Notes on Gershom Scholem’s Sabbetai Zevi”, 117. 90 Ibid., 100. Kurzweil quoting Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin”, 351. [Hebrew]. 91 Kurzweil, “The Limits of the Authority of History”, 183. 92 Ibid., 179. 93 Kurzweil, “Notes on Gershom Scholem’s Sabbetai Zevi”, 102. 94 Ibid., 109. 95 Ibid., 114. 96 Kurzweil, “On the Use and Abuse of the Science of Judaism”, 201. 97 Ibid., 233. 98 Kurzweil, “Notes on Gershom Scholem’s Sabbetai Zevi”, 109. 99 Karl Löwith, “The Historical Background of European Nihilism”, Nature, History and Existentialism, Northwestern 1996, 10. 100 Karl Löwith, Weltgeschicht und Heilgeschehen, Stuttgart 1953, 25. 101 Ohana, “Talmon, Gershom Scholem and the Price of Messianism”. 102 David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in GermanJewish Thought, Princeton 2003; Idem., “The Scholem-Kurzweil Debate and Modern Jewish Historiography”, Modern Judaism 6, 3 (1986): 261–286; Moshe Golttsin, Baruch Kurzweil as a Cultural Critic, Ramat Gan 2008. [Hebrew]. 103 Kurzweil, “Israel and the Diaspora”, Struggling for the Principles of Judaism, 273. 104 Kurzweil, “Jewish Nationalism in Our Time”, 360. 105 “The Correspondence Between David Ben-Gurion and Baruch Kurzweil”, in Ohana, ed., Messianism and Mamlachtiut, 361. [Hebrew]. 106 Ibid., 362. 107 Ibid., 365.

250  Nietzsche in the Holy Land 108 Ibid. 109 Avi Saguy, “The Measurement – From Ernst Simon to Yeshayahu Leibowitz”, The Challenge of Return to Tradition, Jerusalem 2003, 59–80. [Hebrew]. 110 Ohana, “Messianic Canaanism”, in Avi Saguy, ed., Michael’s Book – Between These Days and Those Days – A Gesture to Michael Bahat, Jerusalem 2007, 245–276. [Hebrew]. 111 Kurzweil, “Israel and the Diaspora”, 273 [Hebrew]. 112 Kurzweil, “On the Education of the Generation and Its Culture”, On the Spiritual Confusion of Our Generation, Ramat Gan 1978, 194–195. [Hebrew].

8 Hebrew Hellenism

Eldad the rebel Judaism, said the historian Jacob L. Talmon, is one of the major axes in Nietzsche’s teachings.1 Israel Eldad accepted this basic premise, but he came to opposite conclusions. Contrary to Talmon’s thesis that there is a dichotomy between Nietzscheanism and Judaism, Eldad saw a biblical-Dionysian synthesis in Nietzsche. In his opinion, Nietzsche eschewed the usual idea that “Judaism” represents a single uncompromising teaching and morality and “Hellenism” represents an aesthetic and intellectual multiplicity. Both Nietzsche’s translators – Eldad in Hebrew and Kaufmann in English – found in him an admiration for the will to power of historical Judaism, both biblical and exilic.2 But Eldad also made the original and surprising claim that Nietzsche’s admiration for the Old Testament was a product of this classical philologist’s admiration for the culture of ancient Greece. As a central theme of his article “Nietzsche and the Old Testament” (1985), Eldad indicated that the mutual affinity of Judaism and Hellenism was a major axis of Nietzsche’s thinking, and, in his words: “Again and again, Nietzsche throws a surprising bridge between the Jews and the Greeks”.3 It is not surprising that he said, “Again and again”, for Eldad suggested finding the explanation for this in section 475 of Human, All Too Human. There Nietzsche stated that Judaism gave birth to Western culture and linked Europe to the Greek heritage. The Greek connection in Nietzsche’s admiration for Judaism comes according to Eldad from the will to exist, the Dionysian life-force creative of new values that he finds in it: “This life-force is so great that Nietzsche does not shrink from proposing it as a model even for the Greeks”. In other words, Eldad took the Nietzschean concept of the Dionysian love of life to an extreme, believing that Nietzsche thought that Judaism was even more Greek than Hellenism itself! As proof, Eldad quoted section 72 of Daybreak, where Nietzsche wrote, “The Jews, a people which clung to life [. . .] like the Greeks and even more than the Greeks”. Even the Greeks could learn from the heroic image of the Hebrew Patriarchs, claimed this admirer of Greek culture. To contrast the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament  – as seen by Eldad, echoing Nietzsche – is heroic, belligerent, and authentic, and represents a philosophy that is life-affirming, while the New Testament is ascetic, moralistic,

252  Nietzsche in the Holy Land and degenerate, and represents a philosophy that is life-denying. Jesus is the Jewish-Christian exception that proves the rule: his holy anarchism is beyond good and evil.4 The decline of positive Judaism began with the appearance of the concept of sin, and from there it penetrated into Christianity. The priests were the heirs to the prophets, but the key to the degeneration does not lie with the Jewish priests but with the Aryan outlook which regards the “sacred lie” as the manifestation of a decadent will to power. In seeking (again and again!) to distinguish between Nietzsche and his falsification by the National Socialists, Eldad quoted section  142 of The Will to Power condemning the corrupting Aryan influence, saying that “this judgment on Aryanism” is enough to disprove any possible idea of the influence of Nietzsche on Nazism. The Eldadian reading of the Jewish-Greek synthesis is a subversive reading, parallel to the Aryan-Christian synthesis just mentioned. In his introduction to his translation of Nietzsche’s four last works written in 1888, Eldad returned to the struggle between Hellenism and Christianity, or, as he put it, between Dionysius and Jesus. According to him, the circle was closed here, which was opened with the Apollonian-Dionysian disposition in The Birth of Tragedy. And on the very threshold of his collapse, Nietzsche finished “Dionysius or the Cross”. Here we have a fascinating struggle over the Greek heritage: on the one side Eldad and the tradition of the Hebrew rebirth which annexed Hellenism to Judaism, and on the other side Martin Heidegger and also the Nazis, who sought to annex Hellenism to Germanism. In the German tradition there was a strong current which had an obsession with the ancient Greeks. Beginning with the Romantics and up to the National Socialists, it was believed in many circles that Germany should remake itself by creating a modern mythology, as Homer did in his time when he united the Greeks. Heidegger, like others, saw Greece as the model: perceiving an inner connection between the German language and Greek language and thought,5 he thought that fate had summoned the Greeks in the past and the Germans of his day to embody the vision of the mystery of being. Heidegger feared that the West was declining. Europe was in a period of “forgetfulness of being”, a sickness that had been spreading in the West since Plato. The Christian-Platonic tradition had degenerated, and the West was sunk in the dark age of technology. The “mystery of being” was hidden, and the task was to reveal it. The place of the profound pre-Socratic circles had been taken by the cheap substitute of metaphysics. Western philosophy had reached exhaustion and had ended in nihilism. Fate had chosen Germany for the assignment of saving the West. At the beginning of the history of being, the Greeks had brought, as the Germans were to bring now, being into a new era.6 This self-created mythologization also led to the national-socialist desire to create a totalitarian polis. When Heidegger began his course on Nietzsche in the 1930s, he chose to quote the following sentence from The Antichrist: “For almost two thousand years there has not been a single god”. This was a new cry on Nietzsche’s part, and a proposal to create a revolutionary era in the twentieth century: no longer the familiar narrative of “God is dead”, but a call for a return of the gods who would bestow a new meaning, this time through politics, on human

Hebrew Hellenism  253 existence. Hitler also claimed that anyone wishing to create an authentic model for the renewal of the West would have to turn to Greece. He saw himself as the heir to the Greeks, and like them he wanted to fuse “form” with politics. His national-socialist creation sought to produce a new race of heroic men, contemporary images of the Greek gods.7 Although he was already drawn to Nietzsche when he was a pupil in the Gymnasium in Lodz, Poland, it was only as a student of philosophy and history in Vienna in 1929–1935 that Eldad began to be engrossed by Nietzsche’s writings in the university library. He read them enthusiastically, but as his proposal to write his doctoral thesis on Nietzsche was not accepted, he chose as his subject Eduard von Hartmann.8 He returned to his main preoccupation in 1937, when he was 27, in an article entitled “Schopenhauer and Judaism”. In his contrasting treatment of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in this article, one may see the first expressions of his Hebrew-Nietzschean outlook: The commandment of life is so strong in Judaism that it found an echo in the words of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s disciple and major opponent. He is full of praise for Judaism because of the strong sense of life that is in it; so much so that he decides that the only sin of the Jewish people was that it gave to the world Jesus of Nazareth and his teaching antithetical to life. Does it follow that in Nietzsche’s system Judaism is questioned on account of this? Far from it! Schopenhauer denies the value of life because of its lack of purpose and its suffering, while Nietzsche affirms life despite its purposelessness and suffering. The value of life resides in life itself. (Greek teachings, Goethe)9 Eldad claims that Schopenhauer views the world as dominated by the blind lust of the will. This eternal and immanent passion of the will is different in his opinion from the concepts of the will one finds in Jewish philosophy such as the “rational will” of Solomon Ibn Gevirol (1022–1068) the Andalucian Hebrew poet and Jewish philosopher, and the religious “holy will” of Rabbi Isaac Hacohen Kook. The cause of the Schopenhaurian pessimism is the impossibility of satisfying the desires of the will, which can only give way to new desires. Desire is inseparable from suffering, for it longs for what is not, with the result that suffering is eternal and inescapable. This is the reason for the negative value of life in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The arbitrary nature of life results in a lack of taste and purpose. Schopenhauer’s morality is “a morality of the desperate who are doomed to die; the morality of Judaism, a morality of development and confidence, is a morality of justice”. The Nietzschean amor fati finds the value of life in life itself. The Schopenhaurian will is a nihilistic will, a will-for-will’s-sake, while the Nietzschean will is a will to power, a will-to-life. This is the background to Eldad’s continual fascination with Nietzsche, the admirer of Judaism and the will-to-life it contains. In 1937, Eldad published a short article entitled “Berdichevsky the Rebel”, a self-testimony containing an early exposition of the Hebrew-Nietzschean

254  Nietzsche in the Holy Land principles which reached their full development in the idea of national existentialism. At this early stage of his career, four years before his immigration to Israel, Eldad, writing in Poland, perceived Berdichevsky’s slogan, “the transvaluation of values”, as a call to the Jewish public in fin de siècle eastern Europe. “Berdichevsky took his manifesto for the revolt of the Hebrew people from the school of the German scholar, Nietzsche”.10 The starting-point of the article was the importance of the will in the life of the individual and of the nation. The will is supreme, for life is movement, and all movement derives its force from the will, whereas reason holds back. Two thousand years of exile upset the balance between will and reason in the Jewish people and emasculated Hebrew vitality. Life was centered in the spirit, in the intellect. But the revolution in the Jewish people which gave rise to the Jewish national movement Zionism recognized this sickly dominance of the intellect over the will. According to Eldad, the Jewish philosopher Ahad Ha-Am and the national poet Haim Nahman Bialik were representative of this spiritual sickness, which led to a weakening of the national will. This, said Eldad, was the background to the call to rebellion made by Berdichevsky, who identified the contraction of the will and the weakening of the spirit as the national malady. Thus, Eldad wrote, echoing Berdichevsky: Straighten the Jew’s back which has become hunched from poring over books! Lift off his shoulders the burden of study and philosophy and open his eyes to the beauty around him! Will is more important than spirit. Beauty has precedence over abstract speculation; a healthy body has precedence over a refined intellect. Laughter has precedence over a sigh, the future is more important than the past. We must shake off the burden of the past, of exile, of sadness. Burn the rotten old before the entry of the new.11 Some 30 years later, Eldad dealt with the “Hebrew revolt” once again in his article “Micah Joseph Berdichevsky, Between Egypt and Canaan” (1971). In linking Nietzsche and Berdichevsky, Eldad wished to show how harmful Ahad HaAm’s historiosophy had been to Jewish life and how beneficial Berdichevsky’s historiosophy was to Hebrew life. Eldad developed the theme of rebellion which had preoccupied him in the first article. Berdichevsky represented for Eldad the principle of individualism in rebellion, the revolt of the individual against the mass, for the individual takes precedence over the mass, and the world was created for his sake. Berdichevsky, who was concerned with the particular rather than the abstract, with the differentiating rather than the uniting factor, belonged in his opinion to the romantic current in Judaism which broke away from the Haskalah (the Jewish intellectual movement in Europe at the Enlightenment era), which by its very nature was rationalistic. Reason abstracts and generalizes: will and feeling motivate and create, and the power of the will is thus preferable to the power of thought. Not “cogito, ergo sum  – I  think, therefore I  am  – but I  will, therefore I  am”. Life is decisiveness, and decisiveness is feeling, imagination, will, and individuality. Eldad concluded, “Through this, Berdichevsky places himself within the most recent current in philosophy, the one we call existentialism”.12

Hebrew Hellenism  255 According to Eldad, Berdichevsky’s disillusionment with the Haskalah was chiefly due to its abstract nature. Its excessive rebelliousness and admiration for the foreign led to self-hatred. As a natural rebel, Berdichevsky could not help admiring the maskilim (the people of the Haskalah), who dared to break out of the constrictions of traditional Judaism. All that was conventional or institutional was a straitjacket for him, but he did not call for rebellion for its own sake. Eldad commented, And so the Haskalah came along and destroyed an old building, and that was a good thing, for Berdichevsky took as his motto Nietzsche’s saying, “If you want to build a temple, you have to destroy one first”, but what temple did it build in place of the old one?13 In his search for particularity, Berdichevsky agreed with his great rival Ahad Ha-Am that redemption was not to be found in imitation of the West and its culture. Their disagreement was about the nature of that particularity. Berdichevsky put the Jews before Judaism, the concrete before the abstract, existence before essence. Eldad instinctively concurred with Berdichevsky: “My genes revolted against Ahad Ha-Am. I later learnt from Klausner [Joseph, the Israeli historian] why this was so”.14 Eldad disliked the abstract and historicistic approach of Ahad Ha-Am, which aimed at a “universal prophetic morality” or a “prophetic monotheism”. He sided with the national existentialism of the Berdichevsky school of thought: “Not universality [. . .] but the idea of the specific, belief in [God’s] national character, in the rebuilding of the city of His majesty, Jerusalem”.15 Eldad adopted Nietzschean motifs from Berdichevsky to support his nationalexistential outlook. Thus, unity is not the most important thing but separateness, zealousness against foreign gods. There is a perpetual conflict between heaven and earth, between the book and the sword, but all opposing principles are legitimate in Judaism. Those who wish to base Judaism on a single principle or system do it an injustice. What are the reasons given by Eldad for Berdichevsky’s war against “Judaism”? Abstract Judaism is an escape from life and antithetical to nature both in its modern Jewish form, its traditional religious form and in the form of Ahad Ha-Am’s “spiritual centre” which bases Judaism on abstract ideas like the unity of God and prophetic morality.16 In order to prove the nonexistence of a unified, conceptual, and abstract Judaism, Berdichevsky went in search of a different Judaism or a “Judaism of the other”. Adopting Nietzsche’s historiographical approach as expressed in the essay “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life”, Eldad like Berdichevsky pointed to the currents of opposition which always existed next to mainstream Judaism: opposite the “true” prophets one had the “false prophets”, opposite the Pharisees one had the Sadducees, and there were the Kairites, the “false” Messiahs and Spinoza. For Eldad, Berdichevsky symbolized this “opposing current” in Judaism. His attraction to Hassidism, for example, exemplified this spirit of revolt. Eldad wrote that Hassidism was a revolution, with the concept of a transvaluation of values, and made the tzaddik almost into a Nietzschean superman.17 The historian of the Kabbala Moshe Idel also interprets the Hassidic tzaddik according to Nietzschean concepts.18

256  Nietzsche in the Holy Land It was not only a matter of demonstrating the many-sidedness of Judaism but also of supporting the rebellious and belligerent parties. Eldad finds in Berdichevsky an affirmation of controversy and conflict: For, behold, war is the mother of all that lives, as we learn from Heraclitus [. . .] and life is war, and whenever one ceases to fight, life is at its last gasp or is unworthy of being called life.19 Behind these words one may perhaps perceive the Nietzschean-Dionysian-­ Heraclitan formulation in Ecce Homo: The affirmation of passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy; saying “yes” to opposition and war; becoming, along with a radical repudiation of the very concept of being  – all this is clearly more closely related to me than anything else thought to date.20 In Eldad’s opinion, Yavne (which symbolizes the priority of spiritual Judaism over national considerations at the time of the revolt against Rome) was not representative of Judaism’s will to power: the national morality was expressed in the fighting Jerusalem and not in the spiritual Yavne and its sages. The two alternatives are thus an active freedom as the expression of the selfwill of the individual or a passive freedom which is imposed from outside: we have here the positive will to power versus a negative will to power. Eldads’s Nietzschean starting-point was a nationalism not derived from ressentiment (a concept of Nietzsche’s meaning an introverted and repressed sense of animosity), or from a consciousness of others, but based on “the positive and very physical foundation of the national entity, of the Jewish people as an actual concrete people and not only as a spiritual or moral idea”. In opposition to this Hegelian approach, Eldad set a self-conscious Hebrew nationalism motivated by the will: Not as one banished among the nations, not as a refugee, the victim of pogroms, not because the nations do not want it to exist but because it itself wants to exist and return to living a full life, which is only possible on its soil and with its own sovereignty. Berdichevsky therefore sanctions Zionism not as the “Jewish problem” requiring a “solution” but as the independent sovereign will-to-redemption of the people of Israel. The will-to-sovereignty is the product of the sovereign will, something derived in him from the voluntaristic philosophy, which sees the will as the motive-force of the whole of existence, and, needless to say, of a free man.21 Berdichevsky’s revolutionary proposition was to turn the last Jews into the “first Hebrews”. In Eldad’s opinion, this phrase “became the progenitor of the new Hebrew ideology, or, to give it its more extreme title, the ‘Canaanite ideology’ in Israel”. The origins of the anti-Zionist Hebrew “Canaanism” of the Canaanite poet Yonatan Ratosh (1908–1981) and of the Jewish-Hebrew messianic nationalism of

Hebrew Hellenism  257 Lehi were the same, but their ramifications were different. The Hebrew ideology of Avraham Stern (1907–1942), the leader of Lehi, was Zionist-messianic and not “Canaanite”.22 In 1941, relations between Ratosh and Stern were broken off, but after Stern’s murder by the British during the period of the British mandate in Palestine, Ratosh saw him as a tragic hero sacrificed for the revival of the Hebrew kingdom. Lehi used the Hebrew discourse a great deal and spoke of “Hebrew lordship”, “the Hebrew people”, and the “Hebrew freedom movement”. Baruch Kurzweil, who first traced the roots of Canaanism to Berdichevsky, wrote, “ ‘the Young Hebrews’ movement is simply the logical and consistent conclusion of spiritual and aesthetic tendencies which have existed for a hundred years in our literature”.23 Kurzweil also saw how Nietzsche’s influence impregnated these “Hebrew” tendencies; it represented an attempt to revive a “Hebrew Hellenism”. The original Hebrews were seen as “the generation which conquered Canaan in a whirlwind”, in the words of the Hebrew poet Saul Tchernikovsky. This view that the beginnings of Judaism can be traced to the “Hebrews”, a tribal people of warriors and farmers rather than of priests and scholars, originated with the historiographical writings of the biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen (1844– 1918). Wellhausen directly influenced the thinking of Nietzsche, who admired the ancient biblical Judaism for its natural, spontaneous, belligerent, and “barbaric” character, and who considered the growing dominance of the priesthood a sign of degeneration.24 Wellhausen’s theory was also reflected in The Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche traced the same development in ancient Greece.25 This romantic primitivism, which rejected abstract Judaism and admired the ancient Hebraism, making a distinction between the Jews and Hebrews, attracted many, beginning with Tchernikovsky, including the scholar of the ancient Orient Adolph Gourevitch Horon (1907–1972), who had a decisive influence on the Hebrew ideology of the Israeli poet Yonatan Ratosh, the founder of the group known as the “Young Hebrews”, and ending with Eldad and wide circles in Lehi. Berdichevsky called for a transformation “from Judaism to the Jews, from abstract Jews to Hebrew Jews”. In his reply to the Jewish thinkers Morris Lazarus and David Neumark, his fellow-student in Berlin. Berdichevsky wrote, “They have both forgotten that the early Hebrews preceded the advent of Judaism and had a different path from that of Judaism”.26 The romantic-primitive dichotomy between nature and civilization was adopted by Eldad and was common to all the Hebrew Nietzscheans, and first of all to the “Canaanites”. Eldad took a further step towards Berdichevsky’s “Canaanite” interpretation, seeing it as having a religious basis. The Nietzschean amor fati which hints at the “existential formula”, as Eldad described it, throws light on certain passages in a diary written by Berdichevsky: “Judaism is my fate which I carry with me, but despite this I am free to act”. This is where the paths of the “Hebraism” of Eldad and Ratosh separate. Unlike Ratosh, who called for a Hebrew revolution which would sever the umbilical connection between Judaism and Hebraism, Eldad respected the Jewish religion, which had preserved the Jewish culture and therefore called on everyone in Israel to honor the Jewish religion even if they are not observant.

258  Nietzsche in the Holy Land

Hebrew nationalism At a meeting of the Zionist Executive on the 11th of November 1944, Eliyahu Golomb (1893–1945), chief architect of the Jewish defense forces in Palestine, linked the attempt on the British envoy Lord Moyne’s life with the fact that that the Lehi group and especially Eldad, were devoted to the concept of the Nietzschean Übermensch (overman). The name of Nietzsche cropped up in the debate in the “Yishuv” (the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine) on the murder of Moyne. This had also been said about Abba Ahimeir, an intellectual and leader of the radical right.27 Speaking of “the attitude of the national institutions and the authorities to the attempt on the life of Lord Moyne”, Golomb said, Nazism and fascism: I still remember an article which appeared in praise of the Nazis which said that there was only one thing wrong with them, and that was that they were antisemitic. In the journal The Last Front I saw something similar, not in connection with the Nazis but with a philosopher on whom the Nazis depend: the Stern group have become Nietzscheans [. . .]. They say, there is no such thing as the masses; the masses are a herd. There have to be “supermen” who are able to impose their authority on this herd.28 In the same year that Golomb made this accusation, the hundredth anniversary of Nietzsche’s birth, Eldad wrote in the Lehi journal, There are not a few of us who exercise their scorn – and, what is worse, their pens – in making the following judgment: “Nietzsche, spiritual father of the Nazis and antisemite, created the concept of the superman, who is a blond beast”. This article, called “Content and Envelope in Nietzsche’s Teaching”, did not carry the author’s name, as it appeared in the Lehi underground journal.29 Eldad wrote it in the infirmary of the prison in Jerusalem. At that same period, towards the end of the Second World War, when Nietzsche was depicted in Europe and the United States as one of the intellectual progenitors of the Third Reich, in Israel of all places Eldad came out with an article enthusiastically defending the German philosopher and clearing him of any connection with the Nazi ideology. On the same occasion, Eldad also answered his critics in Israel: Anyone who sees the slightest resemblance between the idea of a Führer and the idea of the Übermensch must be closer to understanding the soul and character of a Führer than he is to understanding the soul and character of an Übermensch.30 In his article, Eldad warned against the prejudices that Hebrew readers might have about Nietzsche, which would exempt them from a philosophical reading of the Übermensch and from understanding the true nature of Nietzsche’s

Hebrew Hellenism  259 “antisemitism”. A  more profound study would show them that Nietzsche and nationalism were antithetical: If our readers were wise and our writers honest, they would undoubtedly be surprised to learn that there were few things as much hated by Nietzsche as Prussian militarism and modern nationalism of the kind found in the Kaiser’s Germany, and of course how much more, in Hitler’s Germany. Eldad distinguished between metaphorical Nietzschean concepts like “blond beast”, “slave morality”, and “superman”, and their distortion and adoption by National Socialism: If Nietzsche disdained the morality of the masses as a slave morality, how much more would he disdain and abhor Hitler’s morality as the morality of the slave of slaves. For if the herd was beneath consideration for Nietzsche on account of its weakness, the shepherds were beneath consideration because of their loathsomeness. Eldad’s criticism was twofold: it was directed both against the lukewarm reception of Nietzsche Hebrew culture and against his emasculation in the Nazi ideology. His adoption by the Nazis made Nietzsche totally unacceptable to his readers both of the right and left, and gave them a reason not to confront his writings. Eldad also asked the reader to view Nietzsche’s “antisemitism” in a different way and to distinguish it from the antisemitism of his “disciple”, Hitler. According to Eldad, the Nietzschean antisemitism is not emotional like that of Schopenhauer or racial like that of Dostoevsky; it is derived from Nietzsche’s hostility “to all superficial rationalism, to all that is petty-bourgeois and complacent. And that is really what western Europe was like at the end of the nineteenth century”. Eldad claimed that Nietzsche’s antisemitic reputation is contradicted by the philosopher’s positive evaluation of Judaism as a life-affirming religion, unlike Christianity. In support of this claim, Eldad quoted Nietzsche: “Judaism’s one unforgivable sin is that it gave birth to Christianity”. He thought that in the history of the Hebrew people there were many more individuals who resembled the ideal of the Übermensch than among the Germans. It is interesting to note that the term Eldad used here has frequently been translated as “superman”. Twenty years later, however, the translations of Nietzsche favored the term “overman”. In his opinion, it was a mistake to place the Übermensch at the center of Nietzsche’s teachings. The concept became famous because of its attractiveness, because of the opportunity it gave the decadent to seek their image in the mirror of that ideal. Eldad’s obvious aim in the article was to distinguish both textually and in principle between content and envelope in his interpretation of Nietzsche. The fundamental principle in Nietzsche’s philosophizing, according to Eldad, was the announcement of the death of God and, consequently, of the danger of the death of man. Monotheistic religion, and especially Christianity, fetters

260  Nietzsche in the Holy Land man, and the doctrine of original sin emasculate the will to power. The One God fights against nature, gains victory overman by means of fear, and as a result of all this, religion gives rise to hypocrisy and depression. In view of this critique of monotheism, it would be reasonable to suppose that Nietzsche would try to revive the pagan gods, but he was not caught up in the surface of things. The Nietzschean revolution was above all directed against the dictatorship of the divinity. If “man was created in the image of God” is a limitation and restriction, Nietzsche made it his purpose to break down the barrier and unseat this divinity: “For it leads to the wretchedness of man, to the wretchedness of the image”. What was important for Nietzsche was “life, and not just life, but life full of a sense of purpose. For holy above all that is holy is life, and life is development, and where there is no development there is degeneration, petrification and death”. From the very beginning, Eldad’s interpretation of Nietzsche was an existentialist interpretation. His criticism was aimed against the idea of humanity in the abstract and he favored a concrete conception of man. Society, nation, and humanity are merely stages in the development of man. “The whole world bears the image of man”: according to Eldad, the identification of the will to power both as an anthropological principle and as a cosmological principle is the basis of Nietzsche’s existentialism, which rests on three foundations: man is identical with his world, the existence of man takes precedence over his essence, and man is a unique creation who writes the book of his life. Eldad concluded, “Nietzsche’s ideas on man as the centre of the creation do not seem anything unusual, but one should remember he is its centre, not its purpose”. The center is the bridge between man and the superman. Man does not have a single essence, and this invalidates both the religious idea of man, that he is but dust and ashes, and Western culture’s optimistic view that he is the lord of creation. Darwin’s influence on Nietzsche, says Eldad, is liable to give us a false image of the latter. Nietzsche, for example, saw war as an agent of development, and in his colorful way even declared, “I hate peace: give me war!” The essence of war for Nietzsche was the strong replacing the weak, the whole replacing the defective. But this was not a matter of reason, the product of intellectual abstraction, but of creation. Eldad explains, “What is done unconsciously in nature, we must do consciously: conscious creation. But reason does not create, it only points the way, and conscious creation means will”. The Nietzschean evolutionism is transforming necessity into will, and this is one of the paths leading to the Übermensch. In addition to the dictatorship of God, the great enemy of the Übermensch is a materialistic and mechanistic outlook. Nature is anti-materialistic and anti-mechanistic; nature creates, and man too must be a creator. There is an echo here of Nietzsche’s cry – “Give me the creative man!” – which arises out of a fear of human uniformity. Equality is a desecration of the image of God in every man, and it brings in its train petrification and death. Where war and competition have disappeared, there is no development and no will to act. It is not the question “where have you come from?” that determines a man’s worth, but the question

Hebrew Hellenism  261 “where are you going?” Not a propelled force but a propulsive force; not necessity but the will. Eldad placed the will at the center of the Nietzschean morality. Already in this early article, one finds the first signs of his hostility to Kant: Those who want to find the source of Nazism would do better to look for it in Kant than in Nietzsche. The moral doctrine of the “categorical imperative” suits it and in fact derives to a far greater extent from Prussian, militaristic sources, while Nietzsche’s teachings are a direct though extreme outcome of both individualism and idealism, and represent the purest morality. Eldad adopted Nietzsche’s genealogical approach to morality: thus, the concepts “good” and “evil” had no moral value in themselves, but simply a moreor-less utilitarian and functional value. Morality is the product of man’s will, and the morality of the future would be a morality of masters, motivated by the sentiment, “this is my will!” Values are determined by man’s action and his will, and not by the nature of the action. Thus, the idea of morality is fused with the idea of development: what matters is not the good of the mass but the development of the individual. Where morality is concerned, the good is whatever emerges from the depths of the will of a free man: his will for life, creativity, liberty. The Übermensch according to the young Eldad is the product of the concept of free will. Eldad’s “new Hebrew” sought to achieve a seemingly impossible fusion between Nietzscheanism and Hebrew nationalism. In the days of the Lehi underground, Eldad called upon Hebrew youth to raze “to the heights of Zarathustra, that clear and bracing air – not only for aesthetic enjoyment but in order to learn – the concept of the free man”. In his opinion, the Hebrew exemplar of Nietzschean individualism was Berdichevsky, in whose heart the motive-forces of Judaism ran deep. This Nietzschean was both very old and very new, very late and very early. Ahad Ha-Am’s attempt to adapt Nietzscheanism to Judaism, to replace the idea of the individual with the idea of the people, to replace the “superman” with the “superpeople”, did not succeed. It is usual to associate Eldad with integral nationalism, but it is more appropriate to connect him, like Berdichevsky, with “national existentialism”: the combination of a personal existentialist outlook with a nationalist radicalism, with an emphasis on Nietzschean principles such as will, style, the individual and existential experience. He consequently preferred the “wisdom of life” of Berdichevsky to the “professorial wisdom” of Ahad Ha-Am. Lehi’s basic political approach before the founding of the State of Israel was that British rule in Palestine was alien and hostile to Zionism, so that, “fighting it until its departure became the essence of Lehi’s existence”.31 His participation in the nationalist radicalism of Avraham (Ya’ir) Stern, who described this great

262  Nietzsche in the Holy Land enemy as the “anti-Zionist reign of wickedness”, brought Eldad to some absurd conclusions: It is not Hitler who is the hater of the kingdom of Israel and the return to Zion, it is not Hitler who subjects us to the cruel fate of falling a second and a third time into Hitler’s hands, but the British.32 The original ideology of Lehi was crystallized by Stern in the manifesto of the Jewish renaissance, Principles of Rebirth,33 but Eldad took it upon himself to give them a broad interpretation. At one of their nocturnal encounters in 1941 at which only Stern’s silhouette was seen and only his voice was heard, Stern gave Eldad the “Principles of Rebirth” asked him to fill them out.34 Despite the difficult atmosphere, with the closing of the gates of Palestine to Jewish immigrants and the victories of Rommel, Stern sought to impart an optimistic tone to the Lehi manifesto, which had 18 points and aimed, in his words, “at rearing a generation of fighters who would be true to the idea of the revival of the kingdom of Israel”. In the sixth principle, Eldad’s Nietzschean touch may be discerned: As with the bravery with which they sacrifice their lives in time of war, as with the amazing strength, refreshing the spirit to the depths of the soul, with which they go out joyfully to their deaths, the entire world, dancers and poets, are amazed and astounded at the strong will to life that exists in these afflicted and oppressed. It lives in them and will not die in them. “And choose life”: a supreme commandment to the nation.35 Many people disliked this Eldadian pathos.36 Some 50 years later, he commented in his passionate way: “Our impotence in this country and in the lands of exile produced this pathetic tone, and it represented a kind of escape into pathos”.37 Eldad and the national radicalists intended the Principles of Rebirth, steeped in Nietzschean concepts and those of Berdichevsky and the ultra-nationalist poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, to be a turning-point in the history of the Hebrew people which had been corrupted by the influence of the Haskalah, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, and socialism. Eldad sought to transpose Berdichevsky’s revolt from the literature of rebirth at the turn of the century to the Hebrew national struggle in the midtwentieth century and to affect a politicization of his call for a transvaluation of values. From the hypocrisy of servility Eldad wished to pass to a national will to power and a revival of the ancient Hebrew image. According to him, the father of the Hebrew race (Eldad preferred the term geza- race – to that of “chosen people”), the patriarch Abraham, embodied the idea of election. This was the historic mission of the people of Israel from Abraham and Joseph to Disraeli and Trotsky. The will-to-existence is the motivation behind the right to the land of Israel. From the war against the British conquerors of Palestine there would arise a new and strengthened Hebrew race whose aim would be the revival of the kingdom. A state is a concept foreign to Judaism: the Hebrew race hopes for a kingdom, which is more than a political framework: “The Third Kingdom is the kingdom of the

Hebrew Hellenism  263 Hebrew race”. The Kingdom of Israel is essentially messianic and is the product of the will and not of necessity.38 It is the organized will of the return to Zion that underlies the conquest of the homeland. Such are principles of existentialist nationalism according to Eldad. The “Fighters’ Party”, which comprised many of the people from Lehi, obtained only 5,363 votes in the first elections of the State of Israel in January 1949 – about one and a half  percent of the total votes cast. In a speech at a special meeting called after the elections to prepare the party committee, Eldad returned to the Principles of Rebirth, inserting some Nietzschean motifs. He asked the members of the “Fighters’ Party” to look at their role as Jews and freedom-fighters in the perspective of the story of the patriarch Abraham’s breaking of idols. Unlike political Zionism, which had been raped, the special quality of this movement was that it was a movement of the will. There was a Nietzschean ring to his words: Man is king of the universe [. . .]. Man is the lord of nature. Man is incapable of creating something out of nothing, but in the world of what exists man is free to create, and there is no limit to his capacity. This idea of the lordship of man-the-creator is a Hebraic idea.39 Zionism had failed in its mission to transform “thou hast chosen us” from a religious concept into a national concept. His conclusion was: “Humanity has not reached the cultural level attained by the creators of the Bible even thousands of years afterwards”. A year later, in 1950, Eldad wrote the article “The Nietzsche Polemic: Between Degeneracy and Madness”, which he published in Sulam, a journal he edited. The failure in the elections and the growing distance from the glorious days of the underground made him think of Nietzsche and preoccupy himself with him. Through him he sought to be consoled “by the company of the great thinkers”. His starting-point was his repeated attempts to prove again and again that the pretension of the Nazis to be the heirs of the prophet of the “superman” was a lie. Even if this pretension was based on a distortion – and anyone who knows Nietzsche and his hatred for the Prussian militaristic spirit and for the “fetish of State” in general will have no doubt that there is a distortion here – even then there is still no justification for making his teaching an educational lesson for us.40 In that case, why should we trouble ourselves with Nietzsche? The first reason, thought Eldad, was that Nietzsche foresaw the defilement of Europe. He smelled the odor of degeneracy and was the first to tell Europe that its idols had been shattered. Europe had passed the peak of its development, and Nietzsche was looking for a way out: He looked for it in a strong man, but did not – heaven forbid – mean a dictator. A dictator is merely the slave of the masses. Anyone who associates the idea

264  Nietzsche in the Holy Land of a dictator with the idea of the superman must be considered a crude forger, and it has rightly been observed among us that the hassidic tzaddik in the days before the degeneration of hassidism was a type close to that of the superman. Concerning the comparison between Zarathustra and the prophets of Israel, Eldad said that the biblical prophets like Moses, Elijah, and Jonah were true to their missions, even when they wanted to escape from them – “A man like me does not flee”  – whereas Zarathustra fled from the masses to isolation on the mountaintops, to escapism. Nietzsche, for his part, escaped into madness and Europe sank into the degeneracy he foresaw. A second reason, according to Eldad, was the strong attraction for Nietzsche which had existed among the young Hebrews since the turn of the century. There was no other foreign thinker, writer, or artist who had caused such a stir, even among the members of “Hashomer Hatza’ir” (the youth-movement of the Jewish left in Europe and Palestine), despite Nietzsche’s loathing for socialism. What attracted the Hebrew youth to Nietzsche was not his positive attitude to the lifeaffirming spirit of Israel or his aesthetics beyond good and evil, but the secret of this attachment to Nietzsche lies in the enormous fascination of innumerable Jewish youths with life, with manifestations of power. These latent forces were aroused in contact with the sun-rays of Zarathustra. The wild water-springs of this poem refreshed the soul and the blood after the publicistics and prose and abstract poetry of Hebrew literature at that time. And, above all, there was the release from chains. The audacity of a great heresy which does not leave despair and nihilism in its train.41 Vitality, power, audacity – all these Nietzschean qualities help to explain the enthusiasm of the Hebrew youth. But, as for Nietzsche himself, according to Eldad his powers failed. But Berdichevsky and the Tze’irim (the followers of Nietzsche who rebelled against Jewish conservatism at the fin du siècle) succeeded because their feet were planted in the Hebrew soil and their heads were not in the clouds. At the end of the article, “The Nietzsche Polemic: Between Degeneracy and Madness”, Eldad gave a translation of a short text, “Nietzsche On the People of Israel”, taken from Daybreak (1880): Among the spectacles to which the coming century invites us is the decision as to the destiny of the Jews of Europe. That their die is cast, that they have crossed their Rubicon, is now palpably obvious: all that is left for them is either for them to become the masters of Europe or to lose Europe as once a long time ago they lost Egypt, where they had placed themselves before a similar either-or.42 Section 205 in Daybreak is one of the passages in Nietzsche’s writings which are instructive for an understanding of his attitude to Judaism. A comparison of the analysis of this section by the Israeli historian J. L. Talmon with that of Eldad

Hebrew Hellenism  265 illustrates their opposing views on the subject of Nietzscheanism and Judaism. Talmon, in his article “The Jewish Aspects of Nietzsche in a Historical Perspective”, written in 1969, quoted section 205 as it is, and was surprised that Walter Kaufmann, the great expert on Nietzsche, gives this passage in his anthology of Nietzsche’s writings but omits the key sentences concerning the decisive event which will take place in the twentieth century: either the Jews will dominate Europe or they will be expelled from it. What remains of the passage is a hymn of praise to the Jews. The question is: is this a case of slavery within freedom  – a terrible misconstruction  – or the manifestation of a strong prejudice? Kaufmann’s whole endeavor is to divest his hero of his monstrosity, but Professor Kaufmann never tires of condemning the dishonesty of others with regard to Nietzsche.43 Talmon’s observation is illuminating, but he too is not exact in translation. Both in the German original and in Eldad’s translation, which Talmon describes as “excellent”, it is not said that “the Jews [. . .] will be expelled from Europe”, but that they “will lose it”. Whatever the case, Nietzsche’s reference to the Jews was taken by Talmon as a portent of things to come and a paradigm of the historical drama of the twentieth century: Think for a moment of the way the matter is stated: either they the Jews or us will be the masters of Europe, and now it is close to midnight. There still ring in the ears of those who still remember Hitler’s horrible speeches his threats and warnings in 1939. In the coming war, either we or the Jews will be consigned to limbo, and I promise you that it won’t be us. Boaz Evron, a member of Lehi and a devotee of Hebraism, was also concerned with Nietzsche’s views on the Jews’ relationship with Europe.44 In his opinion, Nietzsche thought that Europe needed more Jews, as their contribution to Germany and Europe had been considerable and of the highest quality. Evron took this as an endorsement of his national definition of the Jews, for Nietzsche, he claimed, recognized their national identity, which distinguished them from the Germans. Nietzsche, he said, regarded antisemitism as a passing phenomenon arising from a weakness of national consciousness, unlike the Zionists, who foresaw that antisemitism would prevail through a strengthening of nationalism. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche remarked on Germans’ lack of self-confidence and on the weakness of their national consciousness.45 The consequence of this was the rotten fruit of antisemitism, a sign that Germany was unable to digest any more Jews. The solid national consciousness of the Jews and their self-confidence represented a threat to the self-consciousness of the Germans. Nietzsche therefore bypassed German nationalism and envisaged a united Europe into which the Jews would be constructively integrated. In one respect, Eldad supported Nietzsche’s idea of the possibility of a Jewish dominance of Europe. The context was Eldad’s attempt to explain why Nietzsche

266  Nietzsche in the Holy Land admired exilic Judaism. The reason was that the Jewish people  – which was known to be “a people of warriors and farmers”,46 close to the soil and almost Dionysian  – did not undergo much denaturalization in exile, and consequently retained its national existence, even in difficult circumstances. The Jewish people continued to contribute to human culture, claimed Nietzsche according to Eldad, “and continues to mold the face of Europe to the point where it might be possible for it to dominate it through the power of its Geist (spirit)”.47

Greeks, Jews, Christians Jacob Talmon drew a revolutionary contrast between two opposing paradigms: Rousseau versus Nietzsche, order and harmony versus power and vitality, democratic radicalism versus aristocratic radicalism, unity versus singularity and revolution versus counter-revolution. If there are no eternal truths common to all humanity, and if in the world of relative values one truth is the same as another, then, according to Talmon, myth is the Archimedean point. Judaism as the advocate of monotheism – the basis of the universalist revolution – presented a challenge to the polytheistic, relativistic world of myth. On the one hand, one had a clear morality and a universalist ethic, and on the other, relative utilitarian values and aesthetics creative of particularity; on the one hand a single truth and on the other, pluralistic paganism; on the one hand the commandments of the One God and on the other, the wills to power that came with the various myths. Talmon’s reading of Nietzsche was that of an angry prophet. According to him, there could be no compromise between Judaism and Nietzsche, but only a decision one way or the other. Talmon considered it wrong to place the “responsibility” for the Holocaust on Nietzsche because his attitude to Judaism and the Jews was nevertheless ambivalent, because he was contemptuous of antisemitism, and because he was full of wonder at the Jewish phenomenon, but he could not be exonerated completely because he was one of the creators of an intellectual climate. All political ideologies are illegitimate children, but they are not born without father or mother. Eldad proposed another interesting synthesis, a synthesis of Zarathustra and the New Testament. Zarathustra was the Third Testament: despite the centrality of the Persian prophet, it was full of elements from the New Testament. Thus, Eldad pointed out there was an abundance of prophets and heroes in the Old Testament, “but not a single Messiah”.48 From this negative, we deduce something positive: Zarathustra came forward as the new Messiah, exemplifying “Nietzsche’s wish to be a prophet, the giver of a new teaching”, a creator of new values who overturns all the old ones. In the dichotomy, he saw between the biblical Zarathustra and the anti-­ Nietzschean “Ecclesiastes”, Eldad perceived the development of Jewish thought from the concrete nature of the creation narrative to the nihilistic conclusions of “Ecclesiastes”: “Every nihilist will undoubtedly find something to get hold of in the Book of Ecclesiastes”. “Ecclesiastes” was said by Eldad to be pessimistic and Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” to be optimistic. In his introduction to his Hebrew

Hebrew Hellenism  267 translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Eldad dwelt on the quasi-­prophetic rhetorical form of Zarathustra and on its nihilistic content: a rebelliousness that arose out of intense moral suffering, a zealousness for truth, and a hatred for hypocrisy and conventional lies: not nihilistic denial for its own sake but denial almost “for the sake of heaven”.49 Zarathustra created an Aryan, pagan, nihilistic religion, as against the Old Testament, which gave birth to Judaism, a religion of life. Eldad’s subversive comment: the nihilism of Zarathustra is in that case also connected to the religiosity of the New Testament.50 It is hardly surprising, in Eldad’s opinion, if in the days before his outbreak of madness Nietzsche did not identify with the Persian prophet but with the Hebrew prophet Moses, who laid down a new law for mankind; the Nietzschean Moses was the father of Hebrew national existentialism. Unlike Christianity which spread among the peoples and races and lost any vestige of nationhood or race, the Old Testament with its concept of a jealous and vengeful God [. . .] preserved in this way the existence of the people.51 The Jewish religion, which constitutes a nation, is contrasted by Eldad with the cosmopolitan Christian religion. And in one place – the first quotation given by Eldad at the beginning of his article “Nietzsche and the Bible” – Nietzsche exults over the Old Testament because “I find a nation in it”. And at the end of that article, Eldad sings a hymn of praise to the Nietzschean fusion of the necessity to be what you are, amor fati, and the image of God in man. God’s answer to Moses at Sinai, “I am what I am”, is the basis for Jewish existentialism. Thus, Eldad, through the figure  of Moses, linked Nietzschean existentialism with an understanding of Judaism as nationhood. This link up led to the crystallization of a national existentialism.

Nietzsche from right to left In all of the seven volumes of Nietzsche he translated, Eldad began with an introduction or ended with a postscript. He was not satisfied with the traditional role of a translator, who discusses in his introduction difficulties in the text or problems of transcription from language to language, or who hesitates with his readers over the choice of a word or a particular expression. Eldad did much more: with much use of analogy and with great self-confidence, he expressed his opinions on methodological and philosophical matters and on questions connected with Nietzsche’s biography. A summary of some of the salient points of his commentary shows to what an extent, during more than 12 years of translating Nietzsche, Eldad kept up a continuous, consistent, and intelligent reading from the point of view of conceptual interpretation and philosophical content. Nietzsche, like Plato, was classified by Eldad as one of the “philosophers of problems” rather than “philosophers of systems”. He did not create a system like the great modern schools of philosophy, but, on the contrary, destroyed them all and came close to denying the possibility of creating a philosophical system.52

268  Nietzsche in the Holy Land His question, “How does one create a philosophy with a hammer?” translates in practice into shattering the foundations of conceptions of “truth” and undermining habits of thought and common assumptions. Nietzsche was preceded in this by skeptical and critical circles that placed a question mark over various kinds of philosophy, but these remained within the limits of logic and factuality. Nietzsche’s chisel was sharper than those of the previous analytical philosophers because he dared to “cut into the areas of the thinking and feeling soul” – areas still annexed to the field of legitimate philosophy. Thus, Nietzsche paved the way for and heralded two apparently contradictory orientations in modern thought: the logicalsemantic orientation, concerned with the conceptual genealogy of familiar and accepted terms, and the psychological orientation, concerned with stripping off masks and penetrating the depths of the soul. Eldad saw Nietzsche as the forerunner of psychoanalysis. The objective psychological penetration of his essays Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, which was something Freud admired in Nietzsche, undermined the basic assumptions on which religion, morality and law are based to this day. Nietzsche was no longer willing to shut his eyes to the flaws and hypocrisy in the old moral principles and sought to go down to the roots of morality. This radical genealogy was a turning-point for the modern reader, who from that time onwards has no longer been able to “relate to the problem of truth in a dogmatic way as something existing beyond life in eternity”.53 Eldad believed that these acts of exposure were undertaken by Nietzsche not only out of a concern for truth but out of a deep love for the human race, liable to descend into the chasm of the animalistic modern society. As he saw it, Nietzsche, like Freud, was a representative of the Enlightenment and not its enemy, a believer in the universality of humanity, but one whose path was nonconformist, revolutionary, and destructive of systems. A reading of Nietzsche’s writings was recommended by Eldad as liberation from preconceptions, a sort of philosophical exercise in self-liberation. According to Eldad, the perception of the will to power as a comprehensive metaphysical idea is liable to cause Nietzsche’s philosophy to be regarded a philosophical system like Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the will, which is a philosophical construction with a central idea: blind will is the force that moves everything. There are some who have seen Nietzsche not only as the creator of a philosophical system but as the founder of a new religion whose gospel was Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Eldad saw in this tendency to turn Nietzsche into the creator of a “system” or “religion” a danger that could destroy the very basis of his revolutionary enterprise. Nietzsche himself, who was aware of the dangers inherent in his radical ideas and images, is compared by Eldad to a sailor or to a bird that flies above. The images of distant voyages and icebergs they encounter express Nietzsche’s personal feelings but also objective dangers, and the audacious bird flies high and looks far ahead, a fact that gives him the critical distance for philosophical contemplation. Nietzsche loved heights because they rose above the mists, and Eldad observed, “They said he was not a philosopher at all but ‘only’ a writer. This is because it was generally thought that it was usual for philosophers to be unreadable and misty”.54 Nietzsche wrote a poetic prose, full of pathos, and used

Hebrew Hellenism  269 a figurative language with conundrums and images that only someone who knew all his writings would be able to decipher. This aphoristic language has entranced many, but it has also served others as one more reason to “drive him out” of philosophy and place him in aesthetics. And indeed, Nietzsche’s most aesthetic work, The Birth of Tragedy (translated to Hebrew in 1969) was the third essay translated by Eldad. It is impregnated with the spirit of Schopenhauer and Wagner, who, with their antisemitism, Nietzsche later saw as “symbols of decadence and vulgarity”, to quote Eldad. This was soon followed by the translation of The Gay Science, which Eldad understood to mean “creative science”. Despite Nietzsche’s liking for the clarity and exactitude in science, he was unable to admire gradualists who were enslaved by facts, and preferred true, adventurous men of science who sailed the seas and discovered continents of the spirit. The two essays on the roots of morality in Western culture, which were the first works translated by Eldad, in his opinion, constituted the central pillar of the Nietzschean philosophical edifice. He also compared them to excavations conducted beneath the most entrenched fortresses of accepted philosophy and to towers, but not ones that rise up into the air. The next works he ­translated – Daybreak and The Use and Abuse of History for Life (translated to Hebrew in 1968) – were a kind of intellectual laboratory in which experiments were made, involving a re-examination in which the putting of the questions was even more important than the answers. The questions and rejoinders were not only the means but also the content of the will to power as a basic principle underlying existence, and self-overcoming as an educational anthropology was a kind of bridge to the superman. Nietzsche’s four last works written before his breakdown – The Case of Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo, and The Antichrist (translated to Hebrew in 1973) – were not the expression of a poetic experience full of images and spectacles, as Eldad described Zarathustra (translated to Hebrew in 1970), but were pithy in style and content. Their polemical intensity and egocentricity reached the point where Nietzsche idolized himself as a kind of Zarathustra-prophet or Dionysian god. The main gist of Nietzsche’s ideas – the critique of religion, moral relativism, and utilitarianism, the demand for the transvaluation of values – is systematically expressed in Beyond Good and Evil (translated to Hebrew in 1968). The conclusion to be drawn from the book, according to Eldad, is that there is no single universal truth. In an interview with his biographer, Eldad declared, “Whether owing to Nietzsche’s influence or independently of his influence, I recognize the relativism of truth”.55 The main question to be asked with regard to this observation as well as others is: is there any universal validity in a denial of the antisemitic, racist, and national-socialist “truths”? In other words, why should one subjective truth be preferred to another? Without entering the quagmire of postmodernism, we must acknowledge that Nietzsche  – and, following him, his Hebrew translator  – put his finger on a philosophical problem of the first importance, the conclusion to be drawn from which attained full self-consciousness with modern nihilism. The Eldadian Nietzsche passed beyond nihilism. In Eldad’s opinion, only someone who has crossed the threshold of good and evil with Nietzsche, someone who,

270  Nietzsche in the Holy Land together with him, has penetrated to the roots of morality, can rise out of the chasm of nihilism, and moreover, not as a nihilist. Self-overcoming is the essence of Nietzschean power that is creative of morality and does not negate life. As a prophetic monk – not as a priestly monk – Nietzsche descended into the vale of tears of the modern reality in order to uncover its nakedness. In this philosophical exposure there is the danger of infection by the nihil and by degeneracy. Eldad’s answer to this was expressed in Nietzschean terms and with Nietzschean enthusiasm: A love of life, with an extreme opposition to a mass-aspiration sought in all kinds of religious and material ideologies: an aspiration to comfort, to convenience, to casting all suffering out of life. As against this, a love of life with knowledge of the suffering it contains, which is almost a necessary precondition to progress in life, whose true meaning for man is the elevation of man as an individual and of cultured humanity as a whole. With all the extreme criticism, with all the merciless exposure, without nihilism, without relativism, but with a line, a bridge leading upwards. Not to the closed-up heavens but to real existence. A bridge for man to erect and go up on, to raise himself up and together with him to raze up the human race.56 The will to power is deemed to be the answer to nihilism, and according to Eldad, “a turning-point in the history of the spirit, in human culture, a kind of Copernican revolution in moral teaching and the human mission”.57 There is no relation between the will to power as an ideological and cosmological principle and the national-socialist distortion of it. National Socialism was a combination of the two things most detested by Nietzsche: the two mass herd-doctrines, nationalism, and socialism. Hitler, who was convinced by Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche that he was the embodiment of the Nietzschean “superman”, would have been shocked if he had read what Nietzsche wrote to his friend Franz Overbeck: “Just now I am having all antisemites shot”.58 In the Jewish people, the Eldadian Nietzsche saw an elect group, so superior that he recommended mingling German blood with Jewish blood in order to improve the former. It is no accident if among the reasons for Nietzsche’s break with his sister Elisabeth and Wagner was the antisemitism with which they were imbued; there is nothing surprising in the fact that his first pupils and those that published him were Jews. These reflections by Eldad are almost totally devoid of criticism, do not indicate the possibility of different interpretations, and are really only a kind of warm recommendation to read Nietzsche. In this respect, they resemble the “soft” interpretation of Walter Kaufmann. This reading of Nietzsche’s translators into Hebrew and English, important in itself and important in its time, leaves the philosopher of the will to power without teeth to bite with or a hammer in his hand, and makes him humanistic, all too humanistic. On the 1st of January 1963, Eldad received a letter from the Schocken Press asking him to translate Nietzsche. This was just after the Adolf Eichmann trial, which prompted Eldad to make a personal examination of the intellectual sources, which led to the Nazi phenomenon, and his conclusion was that Eichmann was the epitome of the Kantian philosophy. In the Eichmann trial, the name of the

Hebrew Hellenism  271 philosopher of the “categorical imperative” came up in the course of the proceedings. Eldad, who quoted Heinrich Heine, who compared “his mechanical, almost abstract, orderly bachelor existence” to a precise cathedral clock, took this way of thinking to an extreme: “Just as in Kant’s world of pure reason there was no room for God, for free will or for morality, so there was no room for any of these in the world of the Nazi régime which was managed according to rigidly determined descending levels of authority”.59 The role of Kantian philosophy, or, to be more precise, of the Kantian and national-socialist philosophers, came up for discussion again with the appearance of Hans Sluga’s book, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany.60 The book claimed that about ten neo-Kantian philosophers and admirers of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, appointed by the Nazis in 1933 to serve as rectors of universities, enthusiastically supported the Hitler régime without being obliged to do so. They provided the régime with philosophical legitimation based on “ontological value-structures” and “objective moral principles”, concepts drawn from neo-Kantian thought. The journal Kantstudien continued to be published throughout the Nazi period. These revelations do not lessen the seriousness of Eldad’s judgment that Eichmann’s actions had Kantian motivations. What Eldad recoiled from doing to Nietzsche – make him responsible for Nazism – he did to another philosopher, Kant. The Schocken Press’s proposal to Eldad was made close to the end of the Eichmann trial. Eldad hesitated to accept, because in the public atmosphere of Israel at that time Nietzsche was regarded as the father of National Socialism, and he therefore decided to seek the advice of his colleagues on the right, the historian Y. H. Yevin and the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg. Yevin was against accepting the proposal because of his fear that Nietzsche’s antisemitic reputation would attach itself to the Israeli national camp, but Greenberg encouraged him to undertake the translation in the hope that it would serve as an intellectual stimulus and encouragement for their “national body”. The first book translated by Eldad consisted of the essays Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. The publisher Gershom Schocken was enthusiastic about the translation and responded quickly: In my humble opinion, this is one of the most successful translations from a foreign language into Hebrew. The pungency, the brilliance, the glitter of Nietzsche, all this is wonderfully captured in the Hebrew version. You have produced here a great cultural achievement. I am very glad that I have a part in this, and I am only sorry that my late father who always read Nietzsche’s writings to his last day cannot see your work.61 But negative criticism was not in coming. The critic S. B. Urbach condemned the appearance of the book Hebrew in the strongest terms: It required no little audacity to render the crazy reflections of Nietzsche in the language of the holy prophets. Even assuming that the Hitlerian interpretation

272  Nietzsche in the Holy Land of him was distorted, Nietzsche was responsible for that interpretation, and it is most probably the right one.62 And again, This mad philosopher is the epitome of idolatry and the height of barbarism; he preaches the will-to-dominate, force and control of the masses, the blond superman who lords it over the flock of idiots. Although Jews like Berdichevsky or Zeitlin admired his style, the language is a “rough” German which Eldad’s fine translation does not make any clearer. Nietzsche’s innovation was that “he dared to revive the philosophy of wickedness after two thousand years of Judeo-Christian culture, and thereby served as the herald of that most terrible of manifestations of idolatry, Nazism”. These observations, and Urbach’s summation given next, only serve to demonstrate Eldad’s courage in doing the translation: It is doubtful if it is necessary to pollute the Hebrew language with the slanderous words of this supreme source of evil, especially as Eldad, in his short introduction, instead of consigning him to utter disgrace, expresses admiration for him and only gently suggests that it is possible (!) not to agree with some of his principles [. . .]. And do we need this obscene literature to poison the minds and souls of our youth, most of whom are unprotected against it owing to a lack of basic knowledge of the treasures of Judaism?63 Why, then, should one translate a writer so mired in controversy? In his short introductory essay to Daybreak, Eldad gave five reasons: 1) Why not? Nietzsche is not different from any other great philosopher that one has to read Hebrew without agreeing with everything he says. 2) As a critical modern prophecy of the future of mass-civilization and culture. 3) As an educational model of rebelliousness and revolt against accepted ideas. 4) As a symbol of love of life and hope of the elevation of man. The fifth reason was so that the real Nietzsche can become known to the Hebrew reader, who needs it for general human reasons in this generation of confusion and despair, which are perhaps justified among the gentiles but not among us, and for clear Jewish-Hebrew reasons, since because of the factors mentioned above the image of this great spiritual rebel has been distorted, and his true high opinion of the Jewish people and its capabilities is almost unknown, in contrast to our own self-abasement before various strange gods.64 Eldad now answered his critics: I have not toned down anything, for one can always find far greater accusations made by Nietzsche against the German people, the Prussians and their

Hebrew Hellenism  273 militarism, which he loathed with all his heart. I have indeed been able to allow myself to be true to my source. For Nietzsche admired Heine, as I do, and likewise Spinoza, and he wanted to save the German economy by exporting the antisemites.65 Translating Nietzsche into Hebrew was different from the translation of a typical philosophical text. Eldad described the difficulties: Certain provocative formulations which Nietzsche used in the final stages of his creative thought, and the constant revolution without dogmatic petrification have undoubtedly given rise to misunderstanding and revulsion on the one hand and wicked distortion and exploitation for evil purposes on the other.66 The preconceptions people had about Nietzsche in Israel arose, in Eldad’s opinion, from the absence of Hebrew translations of his work: Where respect for Jewish existence is concerned, here too the genuine, complete, original writings of Nietzsche would probably surprise them, as, unlike in previous generations, they no longer form part of the consciousness of present-day Hebrew writers and readers, either through ignorance owing to a lack of translations or revulsion at the ‘bad name’ he has acquired among the pseudo-progressives here. Eldad hoped that his translations would succeed in conveying to his readers of the right and left something of the power and beauty of the original. The task was very difficult as Nietzsche was recognized as a writer and poet unique of his kind in the history of philosophy. Eldad chose to translate entire works and not a selection of writings in order not to fall into the trap of making a subjective or possibly arbitrary choice. The translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra met with criticism in Israel not because of the pretentious nature of the prophet of the new religion but because of a comparison with the previous poetic-biblical translation of David Frishman.67 Zarathustra was published in Hebrew for the first time in Frishman’s translation in the years 1909–1911. Frishman (1859–1922) – writer and critic, aesthete, and translator  – saw Nietzsche’s work as a late biblical book, a “Third Testament” after the Old and New Testaments. The Nietzschean Zarathustra was intended as a rebellion against Judeo-Christian ethics in order to proclaim the birth of a new civilization. Aesthetes such as Frishman, who sought to create the “new Hebrew” by placing him in opposition to the “old Jew”, took as their inspiration “Hebrew” history as expressed in the Bible rather than the exilic period. Eldad initially rejected Schocken’s proposal for a new translation of Zarathustra. He believed that Frishman’s “biblical” translation had already influenced several generations, and second, that the translation required a poet. He was finally persuaded to re-edit Frishman’s translation. When he began editing, however, he

274  Nietzsche in the Holy Land realized that the task was impossible. The high-flown biblical language violated the text and impaired its accuracy. Eldad recalled his excitement as a youth at the translation, “an unforgettable youthful experience in which form and content were combined. Any misunderstanding of the text passed unnoticed in the general excitement”.68 In the meantime, the Hebrew language had been renewed, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra did “not entirely fit the image of an ancient prophet”. The antiquated Hebrew needed to be brought up to date, and, even more important, a change of direction was required. Eldad took upon himself the work of translating Zarathustra in the knowledge that he would not translate it in a biblical style, nor in a poetic style, for not all the book was written in prophetic rhetorical language, and sometimes even the biblical language is used to express anti-biblical sentiments. He thought that one of the achievements of the new Hebrew literature was breaking out of the rigidity of previous stylistic molds.69 He found support for his opinion in Walter Kaufmann, who also retranslated Zarathustra and who declared that one of the reasons for the strangeness of Zarathustra for the contemporary English reader was the classical biblical “King James” language. Thus Spoke Zarathustra had been the most popular of Nietzsche’s works. Eldad ascribed this to its literary uniqueness: The surprising and fascinating dress in which this philosopher and classical philologist clothed his revolutionary ideas – figurative, narrative, poetic and reflective by turns  – a rhetorical-prophetic style interwoven with pearls of aphorism and biting satire, attracted many people and facilitated the reception of his innovations. This was the only work of Nietzsche’s which until then had been translated into Hebrew in its entirety apart from a few aphorisms translated by Jacob Klatzkin.70 The Hebrew reader was drawn at that time to this quasi-prophetic rhetorical style, and this was reflected in a very strong critical review of Eldad’s translation entitled “A New Hebrew Zarathustra”: Take from this poetic prose its ancient character, its prophetic-biblical idiom, and it immediately loses much of its charm, its beauty, its magic and its rhythm. Frishman understood with the intuition of a poet by divine grace the poetic, ancient, florid and also artificial character of Zarathustra. Hence the artistic beauty of Frishman’s translation even if it cannot boast of being a dry and exact philological rendering. When a philosopher-poet like Nietzsche puts the promptings of his heart and his nightmares into the mouth of an ancient prophet, the biblical style of a prophet of Israel is the most fitting.71 The question of translation of essential Nietzschean concepts into the Hebrew language is loaded with significance and depends on the historical context. For instance, David Frishman’s adam elion (superman), before the Second World War and the racist associations it acquired at that period, was changed by Eldad

Hebrew Hellenism  275 into an al-adam (overman). This was a translation sensitive to the historical context, but was it still accurate? It is worth noting that in 1967, in his translation of Beyond Good and Evil, Eldad, in his foreword to the book, did use the term adam elion, although he specifically said that it was only a metaphor. He thought that Nietzsche’s provocative formulations were also connected with his relentless desire to reach the truth and to strip away all taboos. With all Eldad’s criticism of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s editing of The Will to Power, he preferred her version to that of Karl Slechta, which he found unreadable.72 In translating this term, Martin Buber used the formula ratzon le-shrara (will-to-rule),73 while Eldad used the formula otzma (Macht, might) in preference to ko’ah (Kraft, strength). He said, In the translation of terms of this kind one must try to get as close as possible (without full congruence, naturally) to the intention of the author. Nietzsche’s fate in the years when they tried to link him with the Nazis made terms like ‘rule’ and ‘power’, which are central to Nietzsche, repulsive to the point of total unacceptability. But in the word itself there is still something which is very characteristic of Nietzsche, and that is fidelity to oneself.74 Of the connection between power and truth-to-oneself in Nietzsche, Eldad spoke in 1977, ten years after he began to translate him. At the ceremony for his reception of the Tchernikovsky Prize for his translation of Nietzsche into Hebrew, the judges said in their address, Of course one can take exception here and there to some things in Dr. Israel Eldad’s translations, but one cannot help but be amazed at the quantity of the translations and at this vast undertaking [. . .]. On the whole, one can say in all sincerity that Eldad entered the pardes (the acronym formed from the initials of these four approaches to Biblical exegesis in rabbinic Judaism) of Nietzsche and came out of it with these translations safe and sound. (This is a reference to the talmudic legend about a group of rabbis who entered the pardes [orchard] of esoteric knowledge. Only one of them came out sane). In his reply, Eldad summed up the place of Nietzsche in his life: And this is what we are so much in need of today: to be true to ourselves, to our individuality. Let us be very much ourselves, and through this individuality of spirit, soul and body we shall also find the power that belongs to us and which exists within us.75

Notes 1 Jacob L. Talmon, “The Jewish Aspects of Nietzsche in a Historical Perspective”, The Riddle of the Present and the Cunning of History – Studies in Jewish History in a Universal Perspective, ed. David Ohana, Jerusalem 2000, 77–91. [Hebrew].

276  Nietzsche in the Holy Land 2 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, NJ, 1950; see also Eldad’s translation of this book, Jerusalem, 1982, 264–266, 273–275. [Hebrew]. 3 Israel Eldad, “Nietzsche and the Old Testament”, in James C. O’Flaherty, Timothy F. Sellner and Robert M. Helm, eds., Studies in Nietzsche and the Judeo-Christian Tradition, Chapel Hill 1985, 46–68. 4 Eldad, “Nietzsche and the Old Testament”. 5 Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger”, trans. M.P. Alter and J.D. Caputo, Philosophy Today 20 (1976): 267–284. 6 J.J. Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art and Art Works, Dordrecht 1985; K. Harris and C. Jamme, eds., Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art and Technology, New York 1994. 7 Robert Wistrich, Weekend in Munich: Art, Propaganda and Terror in the Third Reich, London 1995. 8 Israel Scheib (Eldad), “Der Vluntarismus Eduard von Hartmanns in der Abhängigkeit von Schopenhauer”, Ph.D. thesis, Universität Wien, 1933. 9 Eldad, “Schopenhauer and Judaism”, Metzuda 2, 3 (May 1937), 33. [Hebrew]. 10 Eldad, “Berdichevsky the Rebel”, Metzuda 2, 3 (May 1937), 31. [Hebrew]. 11 Ibid. 12 Eldad, “Micha Joseph Berdichevsky, Between Egypt and Canaan”, Kivunim 9 (1980): 37–59. [Hebrew]. 13 Ibid., 39. 14 Ohana, Interview with Eldad. 15 Eldad, “Berdichevsky, Between Egypt and Canaan”, 40. 16 A. Ginzburg (Ahad Ha-Am), “Questions of the Day”, Ha-Shilo’ah 4, 1898, 97–105. [Hebrew]. 17 Eldad, “Berdichevsky, Between Egypt and Canaan”, 41. 18 Idel, “A Union of Opposites”, Davar, 4 February 1994. [Hebrew]. 19 Eldad, “Berdichevsky, Between Egypt and Canaan”, 42. 20 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufmann, New-York 1966, 729. 21 Eldad, “Berdichevsky, Between Egypt and Canaan”, 43–44. 22 Yaakov Shavit, From Hebrew to Canaanite, Tel Aviv 1984, 98. [Hebrew]. 23 See James Diamond, Barukh Kurzweil and Modern Hebrew Literature, California 1983. 24 F. Boschwitz, Julius Wellhausen, Jerusalem 1982. [Hebrew]. 25 See also Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Roddle: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews, Cambridge 1998. 26 Berdichevsky, “Zionists”, Essays, Tel Aviv 1960, 51. [Hebrew]. 27 Abba Ahimeir, “BTR as a World-View”, Massuot 98, 12 October (1928): 6–7. [Hebrew]. 28 Eliahu Golomb, Proceedings of the Restricted Zionist Executive, 19 November 1944, Central Zionist Archives, S 25/1804. [Hebrew]. 29 Eldad, “Content and Envelope in Nietzsche’s Teaching”, Lohmei Herut Israel – Ktavim, 1, Tel Aviv, 1959, 785–788. [Hebrew]. 30 Ibid. 31 Eldad, “Neither Fascists nor Bolshevists but Fighters for Israel’s Freedom”, Nativ 6, 11 November 1989, 64. [Hebrew]. 32 Scheib (Eldad), “At the Crossroads, The Gedud Ha-Ivri At This Time”, Ha-Medina, 1, 15 February 1940. [Hebrew]. 33 Eldad, “Neither Fascists nor Bolshevists”, 64. 34 Ada Amichal-Yevin, Sambatiyon: Biography of Dr. Israel Eldad, Beit El 1994, 82. [Hebrew]. 35 Ohana, “Nietzsche’s Eldad and Eldad’s Nietzsche”, lecture on 28 December 1991 at a gathering devoted to Eldad under the auspices of the Shorashim Institute. [Hebrew]. 36 Natan Yellin-Mor, Lehi, Jerusalem 1974, 140. [Hebrew].

Hebrew Hellenism  277 37 Yevin, Sambatiyon, 84. 38 Josef Heller, “The Zionist Right and National Liberation, From Jabotinsky to Abraham Stern”, in Wistrich and Ohana, eds., The Shaping of the Israeli Identity, 85–109. 39 Eldad, “Jacob’s Ladder”, Sulam 1 (1949), 4–5. [Hebrew]. 40 Eldad, “The Nietzsche Polemic: Between Degeneracy and Madness”, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, Sulam 2, 7 (1950). [Hebrew]. 41 Ibid. 42 Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge 1997, section 205, 124. 43 J. L. Talmon, “The Jewish Aspects of Nietzsche in Historical Perspective”, in D. Ohana, ed., The Riddle of the Present and the Cunning of History, Jerusalem 2000, 77–91. [Hebrew]. 44 Boaz Evron, A National Reckoning, Tel Aviv 1988, 96–98. [Hebrew]. 45 Ibid., 96. 46 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Eldad, Jerusalem 1978, section 184. [Hebrew]. 47 Eldad, “Nietzsche and the Old Testament”, Studies in Nietzsche and the Judeo-­Christian Tradition, 47–48. 48 Eldad, “Nietzsche and the Old Testament”, 83. 49 Eldad, “Introduction”, in Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Eldad, Jerusalem 1970. [Hebrew]. 50 Ohana, “The Nietzschean Revolution”, The Dawn of Political Nihilism, 13–54. 51 Eldad, “Nietzsche and the Old Testament”, 79. 52 Eldad, “Why Nietzsche?” in Nietzsche, Daybreak; On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, trans. Eldad. [Hebrew]. 53 Eldad, “Introduction” in Beyond Good and Evil, 4. [Hebrew]. 54 Eldad, “Why Nietzsche?” op. cit., 10. 55 Yevin, Sambatiyon, 240. 56 Eldad, “Why Nietzsche?” op. cit., 9. 57 Eldad, “On the Book”, Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 5 [Hebrew]. 58 Eldad, “Why Nietzsche?”, op. cit, 7. 59 Eldad, Hegionot Israel, Tel Aviv 1980, 126–127. [Hebrew]. 60 Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany, Cambridge 1993. 61 Gershom Schocken to Eldad, 18 February 1968, Eldad archive. [Hebrew]. 62 S. B. Urbach, “Nietzsche’s Crazy Reflections in the Language of the Holy Prophets”, Ma’ariv, 10 May 1968. [Hebrew]. 63 Ibid., 64 Eldad, “Why Nietzsche?” 9. 65 Yevin, Sambatiyon, 238. 66 Eldad, “Why Nietzsche?”, 6. 67 Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, Complete Works of David Frishman, Jerusalem 1965, 93–203. [Hebrew]. 68 Eldad, “My Way of Translating Nietzsche”, Ma’ariv, 25 September 1970. [Hebrew]. 69 Eldad, “Introduction”, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 70 Jacob Klatzkin, “Nietzsche”, Teachings of the Later Masters, Tel Aviv 1951, 273–303. [Hebrew]. 71 David Lazar, “A New Hebrew Zarathustra”, Ma’ariv, 18 September 1970. [Hebrew]. 72 Eldad, “On the Book”, Nietzsche, The Will to Power. 73 Martin Buber, “Nietzsche’s History of Man”, Giliyonot 7, 4 (1938), 279–285. [Hebrew]; idem., “Feuerbach and Nietzsche”, Pnei Adam, Jerusalem 1965, 40–53. [Hebrew]. 74 Eldad, “On the Book”, 8. 75 Yevin, Sambatiyon, 244.

Summary

Different definitions given to phenomena of this kind, from the “religious existentialism” of Martin Buber to the “rent in the heart” or “secular sanctification” of Micah Josef Berdichevsky or the “Jewish existentialism” of Joseph Chaim Brenner, stress the gap between inner experience and normative definition, a gap that reveals a constant tension of faith and a lack of theological satisfaction. “Heretical religiosity” is a liminal position that protects the constant tension between a ­religiosity that is not a reflection of accepted religious practices and heresy, especially metaphysical heresy. What is special about this oxymoronic position is the blending of faith and denial into a single dialectical synthesis. This state of mind is defined by its inner components and not by traditional or analytical concepts such as “faith”, “nihilism”, “repentance”, “religion”, or “heresy”. It is desirable that an examination of a phenomenological position of this kind should not be made through its relationship to other phenomena but by regarding it as a phenomenon in its own right. It is obvious that the “heretical-religious” thinkers were all different from each other in many ways: Zeitlin and Rosenzweig did not support Zionism, unlike Scholem; Buber and Scholem recognized the importance of Jewish myth (one of them in Hassidism and the other in Kabbala), were moderate in their national outlooks, and complex from the religious point of view. Buber turned towards philosophy and theology, and Scholem was content to remain a historian. Scholem was not afraid to tackle nihilism and heresy, and examined their dialectical metamorphoses, while Kurzweil thought that by so doing Scholem was dragging Judaism into the depths of nihilism. Eldad sought an existentialist and heroic nationalism, while Kurzweil foresaw the nihilistic consequences of turning the theological into the political. This study does not treat them only as individual thinkers, but as elements of a unique religious phenomenon. Yes, these thinkers did not have a common ideology, a single philosophy, or a religious common denominator. What places them under the same “roof”, deriving, among other things, from their confrontation with the Nietzschean philosophy (Nietzsche was not, of course, the only thinker they dealt with), is what I  called their “heretical religiosity”. This was a dual self-awareness of heresy and faith. There were those amongst them that rejected it and those that accepted it, but for all of them it was a philosophical crossroads and a theological parting of the ways with regard to their Jewish

Summary  279 self-perception, their new religious consciousness, and their modern philosophical thought. Walter Kaufmann claimed that because Nietzsche was an inseparable part of German history and culture, a study of his legacy is to a great extent a study of the history of Germany.1 Can one deduce anything from this concerning Nietzsche and modern Jewish thought? I answer this question in the affirmative. The Nietzschean lexicon with its special concepts, its metaphors and similes, its images and analogies, its oppositions, and criticisms, did not pass over the Jewish thinkers as it was an inseparable part of the intellectual habitus of the educated elites in eastern and central Europe at the turn of the century and in the first half of the twentieth century. The Jewish youths were educated in the European academies where they absorbed the intellectual climate of the period and read the works of the radical Weimar philosopher. They were flesh of the flesh of European culture, and the “Jewish Nietzscheanismus”, to use Ahad Ha-Am’s expression, left its imprint on them also.2 Although the Jewish thinkers came from different sociocultural backgrounds – for instance, the background of Hillel Zeitlin was remote from that of Gershom Scholem – common subjects linked by a Nietzschean thread nevertheless preoccupied them in the modern era of religious heresy or heretical religiosity, self-creation, and national renewal. The revolutionary Nietzschean concepts formed the personal philosophical lexicon of each and every thinker, and at the same time was the anvil on which the common discourse of the various Jewish thinkers on cultural continuity or forgetfulness of history, normative ethics, or creative aesthetics; generations-old tradition or the birth of a new Jewish species; and nationhood, religious faith, and denial, were forged.

Notes 1 Kaufmann, op. cit, 9. 2 The expression “Nietzscheanismus und Judentum”, as the name of a translated article appeared in Ost und West, Berlin, 2, 3, 4 (1902): 145–152, 241–254.

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Index

Aeschylus 102, 131, 201 aestheticism 58, 78, 156 aesthetics 7, 15, 20, 279; Buber and 113, 148; Eldad and 264, 266, 269; Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 37, 45; Kurzweil and 222, 225; Rosenzweig and 92, 97, 102 – 103; Scholem and 156 – 157, 198, 202; Zeitlin and 54, 60 affinity 3 – 4, 13 – 14, 17 – 18, 20, 24; Buber and 118, 134 – 136, 141, 145, 150; Eldad and 251; Kurzweil and 224 – 225, 232, 235; Rosenzweig and 96; Scholem and 165, 173 – 174, 193, 204 ah-iin 70 – 71 amor fati 2, 13, 43, 195, 253, 257, 267 anthropology 45; Buber and 118, 143, 145 – 146; Eldad and 260, 269; Kurzweil and 224; Scholem and 186; Zeitlin and 55 – 56, 81 antisemitism 3 – 5, 15; Buber and 122, 129; Eldad and 258 – 259, 265 – 266, 269 – 271; Scholem and 173 Apollonian, the 92, 102, 122 – 123, 201, 252 apostasy 63 – 64, 74, 77, 171 – 172, 191, 209 Appenfeld, Aharon 43 Arendt, Hannah 3 Around the Point (Abramson) 41 – 42 art 65 – 67, 69 – 70, 156 – 157, 197 – 198, 221 – 222 asceticism 15, 53, 115, 123, 143 – 144, 225, 251 Autobiographical Fragments (Buber) 14 – 15, 112 autobiography 8, 13, 62 – 70, 225 Bar-On, Shraga 75 Baum, Sender 7 becoming 99 – 100, 117, 256

Ben-Gurion, David 23, 128, 136 – 139, 160 – 161, 175 – 179, 204 – 205 Ben-Gurion, Emmanuel 1 – 2, 20 Berdichevsky, Micha Josef 20, 23 bereavement 41, 231; see also Breakdown and Bereavement Bergman, Samuel Hugo 45, 230 Bergson, Henri 46, 139, 223 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche) 8, 23, 226, 268 – 269, 271, 275 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche) 16, 19; Buber and 113, 122; Eldad and 252, 257, 269; Kurzweil and 221, 225; Rosenzweig and 102; Scholem and 167; Zeitlin and 66 – 67, 70 Bloch, Ernst 10, 135, 158, 167, 169, 209, 235 Bloch, Joseph 160 breakdown 1, 12 – 13, 41, 269; see also Breakdown and Bereavement Breakdown and Bereavement (Hafetz) 42 – 43 Breinin, Reuven 32 Brenner, Joseph Chaim 2, 7 – 8, 20 – 21, 35, 41 – 45, 47; Kurzweil and 224, 230 – 232 Brenner, Michael 160 Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevsky) 64 Buber, Martin 1 – 2, 4, 6, 11 – 16, 18, 34, 278; and the death of God 139 – 143; Eldad and 275; and Fascism 147 – 151; and Jewish myth 130 – 135; and the Jewish renaissance 122 – 125; Kurzweil and 238, 241; and Messianic myth 125 – 130; and mythical hermeneutics 117 – 122; Nietzschean 111 – 117; and political theology 135 – 139; and the problem of man 143 – 147; Rosenzweig and 104 – 105; Scholem and 158, 160, 162 – 164, 168 – 169, 204

300 Index Buber, Rabbi Shlomo 12 Burkhardt, Jacob 92, 123, 158, 226 Canaanism 20, 229, 242, 245, 256 – 257 Cassirer, Ernst 131 – 132, 147, 166, 169, 239 cause 56, 60, 93, 100 – 101, 144, 159, 173 chaos 51, 66, 92, 113 – 114, 201, 234 Christianity 1, 3 – 5, 9 – 11, 20; Buber and 128, 130, 143 – 144, 151; Eldad and 252, 259, 267; Kurzweil and 221 – 222, 229, 232 – 234; Rosenzweig and 87 – 88; Scholem and 163, 170 – 173, 175, 179 – 180, 188, 191, 194; Zeitlin and 52, 57, 74, 77 Cohen, Aaron 126 Cohen, Hermann 88, 96, 118, 157 Cohen, Jacob 20 Cohen, Richard 11 compassion 5, 38, 45, 70, 74, 127 consolation 54, 66 – 67, 70, 78, 102, 113 Copernican revolution 95, 165 Darwin, Charles 38, 45, 260; see also Darwinism Darwinism 33, 56 death 41; Eldad and 260, 262; Rosenzweig and 96, 98, 104; Scholem and 167, 171 – 172, 180 – 181, 183, 203; see also death of God death of God 3, 9, 15, 24, 200, 259; Buber and 139 – 140, 142; Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 31, 43; Zeitlin and 56, 76, 78 Democratic Fraction 122 Descartes, René 10, 95 despair: Eldad and 264, 272; Kurzweil and 241; Rosenzweig and 88 – 89, 103; Scholem and 164, 179, 184, 198; Zeitlin and 56, 58, 64 – 65, 72 – 74 Die Welt (World Zionist Organization) 111 Dilthey, Wilhelm 104 Dionysian, the 12, 24, 31; Buber and 113 – 114, 123, 145; Eldad and 251 – 252, 256, 266, 269; Kurzweil and 221, 223, 225; Rosenzweig and 92, 99, 102; Scholem and 174; Zeitlin and 54 – 56, 66 – 67, 76 discipline 53 – 54, 180 – 181 Divrei ha-adon (Words of the Lord) 16 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 64, 71 – 74, 224, 231, 259 Duffy, Michael 3

Eckhardt, Meister 99 Eldad, Israel 1 – 2, 6, 22 – 24, 246, 278; and Hebrew Hellenism 251 – 257; and Hebrew nationalism 258 – 266; as Nietzsche’s translator 267 – 275; and Zarathustra 266 – 267 elitism 33 empathy 7, 10, 12 – 13, 209 eternity 66, 73, 78, 99 – 102, 195, 268 ethics 13, 15 – 16, 20, 279; Buber and 113, 137, 145; Eldad and 266, 273; Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 35, 37 – 38, 42, 45 – 46; Kurzweil and 222 – 223, 226 – 228, 240; Rosenzweig and 89 – 90, 96, 100; Scholem and 156, 174, 183, 198, 203, 205, 207; Zeitlin and 54 – 55, 59, 70 Even, Joseph 42 evil see good and evil existentialism 4, 18, 20, 23, 278; Buber and 117, 122, 134, 140, 143 – 145; Eldad and 254 – 255, 257, 260 – 261, 263, 267; existentialist revolt 230 – 233; Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 34 – 36, 41, 43; Kurzweil and 225 – 228; Rosenzweig and 87, 89, 95 – 96, 100, 103; Scholem and 165, 188, 196; Zeitlin and 55 – 56, 58 – 59, 63, 67, 71 – 72, 77 faith 6, 9 – 10, 20 – 21, 24, 278 – 279; Buber and 119 – 120, 127, 129, 132 – 133, 142 – 143, 148; Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 32, 34 – 37, 43 – 44, 47; Kurzweil and 230 – 231, 236, 239, 243, 245; Rosenzweig and 87, 89, 96 – 97, 101; Scholem and 173, 184, 193 – 194, 210; Zeitlin and 57, 61, 64, 67, 72 – 78, 81 Fascism 4 – 5, 147 – 149, 167, 175, 197 – 198, 258 Feuerbach, Ludwig 76, 140, 143, 148 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 10, 93, 159, 192, 271 Fighters for Israel’s Freedom see Lehi First World War 7, 11, 18; Buber and 126, 141; Rosenzweig and 103 – 104; Scholem and 158, 164, 184, 190, 196 – 197, 199, 203 forms 11, 57; Buber and 113; Kurzweil and 239; Rosenzweig and 97, 104 – 105; Scholem and 166, 182 Frank, Jacob 16 – 17; Buber and 149; Kurzweil and 238; Scholem and 174 – 175, 180 – 183, 185 – 188, 194, 205, 210

Index  301 Freud, Sigmund 5, 268; Buber and 113, 134; Kurzweil and 222 – 223, 240, 247; Scholem and 164, 167, 184 Frishman, David 8, 273 – 274 From Here and There (Lapidus) 42 – 43 Gay Science, The (Nietzsche) 5, 8, 24, 70, 81, 222, 269 genealogy 1, 11, 20; Buber and 111, 120, 141, 143 – 144, 146; Eldad and 261, 266; Kurzweil and 222; Rosenzweig and 90, 97; Scholem and 165, 189 – 190, 202; Zeitlin and 51 – 52, 57, 73, 76, 79 Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 51, 268, 271 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 10, 60, 121, 157, 225, 253; Rosenzweig and 92, 96 – 97 golem 90, 234; Buber and 118, 132, 138; Scholem and 167, 190, 192, 194, 199 – 203 good and evil 7, 13, 15 – 16, 21, 42, 264; Buber and 142, 146; Kurzweil and 224, 227 – 228, 232, 238; Scholem and 174, 202; Zeitlin and 51 – 52, 54, 57 – 58, 70 Gordon, A. D. 42, 45 – 47, 231 Gordon, Yehuda Lieb 20 – 21 guilt 10, 16, 53, 60, 144, 231, 238 Ha-Am, Ahad 2, 7 – 8, 21; Buber and 122 – 123, 126; Eldad and 254 – 255, 261; Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 34 – 35, 37 – 39, 41, 45 – 46; Kurzweil and 223, 225 – 227, 230 – 231; Scholem and 175, 177, 208; Zeitlin and 57 – 59, 82 Haaretz (newspaper) 22 Habad 7 Hafetz, Yehezkiel 42 halacha 11, 19, 123 – 124, 233, 241 Ha-Shiloah ( journal) 51 Haskalah 7, 20 – 21; Buber and 118, 121, 124; Eldad and 254 – 255, 262; Kurzweil and 236, 241, 243; Scholem and 165 Hassidism 2, 7, 16, 278; Buber and 119, 123 – 124, 127, 134; Eldad and 255, 264; Scholem and 170; Zeitlin and 62, 71 Hebrew Hellenism 82, 257; see also Eldad, Israel Hebrew revival 1 – 3, 19 – 21, 32, 41, 44, 59; in the shadow of Nietzsche 221 – 225, 228 – 229, 231 – 232, 243, 246 Hegel, G.W.F. 10, 14, 33; Buber and 118, 123, 128, 139 – 140, 143; Kurzweil

and 227, 233; Rosenzweig and 87 – 89, 92 – 94, 96, 101; Scholem and 158 – 159, 192, 201; Zeitlin and 52, 56, 58 Heidegger, Martin 5, 25n17; Eldad and 252; Rosenzweig and 90; Scholem and 139 – 141, 147, 150, 164, 198 Herder, Johann Gottlieb 87, 93, 159, 164 heresy 5, 8 – 9, 17, 278 – 279; Eldad and 264; Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 35 – 36, 47; Scholem and 184; Zeitlin and 64, 75 – 76; see also heretical religiosity; heretical secularism; heretics heretical religiosity 2 – 3, 6, 8, 17, 278; Buber and 151; Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 34, 41, 43 – 44; Kurzweil and 246; Zeitlin and 74 – 75, 82 heretical secularism 21 heretics 8, 14; Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 34, 36; Scholem and 184, 194; Zeitlin and 63, 75, 77 – 78 hermeneutics 16, 117 – 122, 200 heroism 15, 24, 61 – 62, 81 – 82, 125 Herzl, Theodor 8, 67; Buber and 111 – 112, 122, 129, 160 – 162, 175, 208 Hillel, School of 57 – 62 historical perspectivism 92 – 93, 226 historicism 53; Buber and 118, 122; Kurzweil and 226 – 227, 233 – 236, 238 – 239; Rosenzweig and 87, 91 – 94, 104; Scholem and 158 – 159 historiography 21 – 22; Buber and 118, 121, 138; Eldad and 255, 257; Kurzweil and 233 – 238, 241 – 244; Rosenzweig and 92 – 93; Scholem and 159, 164 – 168, 177, 207, 209; Zeitlin and 66 Hitler, Adolf: Buber and 128, 141, 147, 149 – 151; Eldad and 253, 259, 262, 265, 270 – 271; Kurzweil and 238; Scholem and 175, 198, 205 Homer 102 – 103, 131, 225, 252 Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche) 69 – 70, 80 – 81, 227, 251, 265 human nature 14, 60, 92, 221; Buber and 113, 131; Scholem and 159, 184, 203 I and Thou 133, 135, 139, 142, 145 I and Thou (Buber) 14, 128 Idiot, The (Dostoevsky) 64 images 11, 279; Buber and 120, 139; Eldad and 253, 268 – 269; Kurzweil and 234; Rosenzweig and 91, 97, 99; Scholem and 197 Islam 77, 175, 179, 188, 205

302 Index Jesus 11 – 12, 78, 92, 130, 252 – 253; Scholem and 157, 171 – 173, 175, 179 – 181 Jewish renaissance 122 – 125, 262 Jonas, Hans 3, 135, 167, 193, 203 Jung, Carl Gustav 16, 141, 164, 185, 237

labor 42, 135, 138, 228 Lansky, Mordechai 7 Lapidus, Arye 42 Lebensphilosophie 23, 34, 123, 126, 158, 170, 224 Lehi (Lohamei Herut Israel) 23, 257 – 258, 261 – 263, 265 Leibowitz, Yeshiyahu 3, 126 Lessing, Gotthold E. 79, 93, 159 Levinas, Emmanuel 3 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 131 – 132, 134, 209 Lilien, Ephraim Moses 111 Lindbeck, George 34 logos 91, 95, 130, 240 Lyotard, Jean-François 209

Marxism 104, 128, 169, 206, 235 Marx, Karl 33, 76, 113, 128, 141, 157 – 158, 167; see also Marxism meaninglessness 41 – 42, 95, 234 Mendelssohn, Moses 93, 159 Mendes-Flohr, Paul 15, 122 Messianism 7, 19 – 20, 22 – 23; Buber and 116, 146, 151; Eldad and 256 – 257, 263; Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 45 – 46; Kurzweil and 226, 229, 233 – 236, 238 – 240, 242 – 246; Messianic myth 125 – 130; and political theology 135 – 139; the price of 203 – 210; Rosenzweig and 97; Scholem and 160 – 161, 171 – 172, 175 – 178, 183 – 185, 187 – 188, 190 – 191; Zeitlin and 51 – 57 metaphysics 8; Buber and 116, 140; Eldad and 252; Rosenzweig and 98, 102 – 103; Scholem and 158, 171, 189, 201; Zeitlin and 54 – 55, 66, 68 – 69, 76, 79 – 80 Metaphysics of Hope (Marcel) 10 Micah, School of 57 – 62 midrash 119, 200 mitnagdim 7 Mittelman, Willard 3 morality 4, 13, 16 – 18, 21; Buber and 115, 136, 142 – 144, 150 – 151; Eldad and 251, 253, 255 – 256, 261, 266, 268 – 271; Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 39, 41, 46; Kurzweil and 224 – 225, 227, 230, 237 – 239; Rosenzweig and 90, 93 – 96, 102; Scholem and 163, 174, 186, 190 – 192, 194, 202; slave 14 – 15, 34, 45, 116, 146, 222 – 223, 259; Zeitlin and 52 – 55, 58 – 59, 71, 74, 79 – 80 Moses 78, 244, 264, 267; Buber and 120 – 121, 134 – 135; Scholem and 157, 179 – 181 Mount Sinai 77 – 78, 121, 130, 267 Mussolini, Benito 130, 147 – 150, 175 myth: Jewish 102 – 105, 119, 127, 130 – 135, 164, 278; Messianic 125 – 130, 169, 210, 240; mythical hermeneutics 16, 117 – 122; see also mythology; mythos mythology 76, 97, 252; Buber and 117, 121, 131 – 133, 135; Kurzweil and 233, 235, 241; rational 88; Scholem and 202 mythos 91, 130

Maasar Rishon 23 Macht (might) 56, 275 Malinowski, Bronislaw 166 Marcel, Gabriel 10

national identity 35, 177, 225, 265 nationalism 14, 18, 20 – 21, 23, 278; Buber and 126, 129, 131 – 132; Eldad and 256, 270; Hebrew nationalism 258 – 266;

Kabbala 16, 18 – 19, 46, 255, 278; Buber and 119, 134; Kurzweil and 236, 238 – 239; Scholem and 165 – 167, 183 – 184, 191, 201, 204, 209 Kafka, Franz 164, 231 Kant, Immanuel 10, 13 – 14; Buber and 112 – 113, 118, 143, 145 – 146; Eldad and 261, 271; Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 32, 34; Rosenzweig and 88, 93, 95 – 96, 101; Scholem and 156, 159; Zeitlin and 54 – 56, 73, 76 Kaufmann, Walter 1, 4 – 5, 24, 265, 270, 274, 279 Kaufmann, Yehezkel 118, 120, 240, 251 Kierkegaard, Søren 88 – 89, 103, 156, 158, 162 – 163 Kook, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hakohen 3, 135 – 137, 175 – 177, 204 – 205, 253 Kraft (strength) 56, 275 Kraushar, Alexander 16 Kulturpolitik 123 Kurzweil, Baruch 1 – 2, 6, 12, 19 – 22, 43, 278; Buber and 126; Eldad and 257; Kurzweil and 221 – 225, 228 – 246; Rosenzweig and 102; Scholem and 194, 210

Index  303 Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 31, 34; Kurzweil and 226, 235, 243 – 246; Scholem and 161, 164 – 165, 168 – 169, 175, 197, 199, 204; Zeitlin and 82; see also national identity nature 46; Buber and 112, 133, 146; Eldad and 257, 260, 263; Kurzweil and 225, 228; Rosenzweig and 103; Scholem and 201 – 202; Zeitlin and 54, 59, 78 – 79 Nazism 4 – 5, 31; Buber and 141, 147, 149; Eldad and 252, 258 – 259, 261, 263, 270 – 272, 275; Kurzweil and 237; Scholem and 163, 165, 168, 186, 196, 198 – 199 Neumark, David 6, 32 – 34, 62 – 63, 117, 257 Nietzschean revolution 1, 13, 15 – 17, 31; Buber and 145; Eldad and 260; Rosenzweig and 100; Scholem and 202; Zeitlin and 54 “Nietzsche circle” 7 nihilism 2 – 3, 15 – 20; Buber and 139 – 142, 149 – 151; Eldad and 252 – 253, 266 – 267, 269 – 270; Kurzweil and 235 – 241; and Messianism 169 – 175; as a modern phenomenon 189 – 199; Rosenzweig and 88 – 91, 97 – 98; Scholem and 163 – 164, 180 – 185, 187 – 189, 205 – 207; Zeitlin and 64 – 65 Nordau, Max 33, 79, 122 nothingness: Buber and 146; Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 33, 42; Rosenzweig and 90 – 91, 99; Scholem and 156, 163, 182, 187, 192, 194 – 195 objectivism 104 optimism 41, 51, 57, 67, 69, 72 overgod 79 – 82; see also Übermensch overman see Übermensch Pachter, Henry 19, 165, 168, 184 paganism 11, 78, 88, 98, 105, 225, 266 Peretz, I. L. 58 perspectivism 19; and revelation 92 – 96, 105, 158, 226, 228 pessimism 66 – 69, 80 – 81, 198, 225, 253 philosopher-poets 78 poets 20 – 21, 61 – 63, 71 – 72, 81 – 82, 224 – 225, 253 – 254 pogroms 6, 8, 58, 256 Popper, Karl R. 93 – 94, 186 priests 224, 252, 257 profane see sacred and profane

progress 20 – 21; Kurzweil and 226 – 227, 233 – 234, 238 – 239; Rosenzweig and 87 – 88, 90 – 91, 93 – 94, 99 – 101; Scholem and 165 – 166, 188 – 191 prophets 14, 24, 38, 45; Eldad and 252, 255, 264, 266, 271; Kurzweil and 224; Zeitlin and 52, 57 psychology 232, 236 – 237 punishment 70, 201 Ranke, Leopold von 92, 158 – 159 rationalism 164, 221, 259; Rosenzweig and 92, 97, 104; Zeitlin and 53, 72 Ratosh, Yonatan 3, 21, 224, 229, 256 – 257 redemption 100 – 101, 245 – 246, 255 – 256; Buber and 126 – 129, 136 – 141; Scholem and 171 – 172, 174 – 175, 183 – 187, 204 – 209 Reik, Theodor 134 repentance 74, 119, 121, 125, 278 revelation 93 – 96, 100 – 101, 103 – 105, 239 – 240 romanticism 78 – 80, 157 – 158, 226 – 227 Rosenzweig, Franz 1 – 3, 9 – 12; and eternal time 98 – 102; and Hegel 87 – 88; and myth 102 – 105; and Nietzsche 89 – 92; and perspectivism 92 – 96; and skeptical philosophers 88 – 89; and Zarathustra 96 – 98 sacred and profane 22, 244, 246 Saguy, Avi 43 – 44 Salomé, Lou 6, 228 Santaniello, Weaver 3 Sartre, Jean-Paul 5, 103, 140 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 10, 88, 93, 122 – 123, 156, 159 Schlegel, Friedrich 88, 192 Scholem, Gershom 1 – 2, 11 – 12, 16 – 20, 117 – 118, 240 – 243, 278 – 279; and the Frankist syndrome 180 – 189; as Jewish Zarathustra 156 – 163; Kurzweil and 233 – 239; and Messianism 169 – 175, 203 – 210; and myth 164 – 169, 199 – 203; and the myth-leader 175 – 180; and nihilism 189 – 199 Schopenhauer, Arthur: Eldad and 268 – 269; Rosenzweig and 87 – 89, 102 – 103; Scholem and 157 – 158, 189 – 190; Zeitlin and 68 – 69, 78 – 79 secularism 20 – 21, 35 – 36, 236, 242 – 246; see also heretical secularism seeker 8 – 9, 76 – 78

304 Index Sefer Zeitlin (The Book of Zeitlin) 75 selfhood 141 self-overcoming 18, 53, 80, 142, 236, 269 – 270 Sevi, Sabbetai 236 – 237, 243; Scholem and 166, 170, 174 – 175, 180 – 182, 185, 191 Shestov, Lev 5, 8 – 9, 63 – 64, 80 – 81; and Zeitlin 70 – 75 Shneur, Zalman 20 – 21, 82, 222, 224, 232 sickness 67 – 69, 79 – 81, 144, 223, 236, 254 Simmel, Georg 6, 37, 104, 158 Simon, Akiva Ernst 112, 125 – 126, 129, 204 sin 63 – 64, 70 – 71, 171 – 172, 183 – 186, 252 – 253, 259 – 260 Sinai see Mount Sinai sinner 11, 74, 78, 97, 224 slave morality see morality, slave sociology 146, 186 Socrates 51 – 52, 66 – 67, 92, 201, 221 Sophocles 102, 131, 201 Spengler, Oswald 92, 98, 104, 198, 209 Spinoza, Baruch 6 – 7, 10, 101, 195 Stalinism 128, 205 Star of Redemption, The (Rosenzweig) 9 – 10, 88 – 89, 96 – 98, 103 – 105 Stern Group see Lehi Stirner, Max 45, 149, 157 – 158, 192 Sulam ( journal) 23, 263 superman see Übermensch symbols 104, 120, 164, 166 – 167, 269 Tchernikovsky, Saul 20 – 21, 224 – 225, 232, 257 Teaching of the Prophets, The (Buber) 126 – 127 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 4 – 5, 7 – 8, 15 – 19; Buber and 112 – 113; Eldad and 266 – 267, 273 – 274; Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 31 – 32; Scholem and 162 – 163; Zeitlin and 80 – 81; see also Übermensch Tillich, Paul 43 Tolstoy, Leo 45, 72 – 74 transvaluation 11 – 12, 15 – 18, 20 – 21, 35 – 38; Buber and 122 – 123; Eldad and 254 – 255; Kurzweil and 222 – 223, 230 – 231 Treitschke, Heinrich von 18, 158

truth 32 – 33; Buber and 148 – 149; Eldad and 266 – 269; Rosenzweig and 89 – 97, 103 – 104; Scholem and 167 – 168; Zeitlin and 53 – 55, 68 – 75, 78 – 81 tsaddik 57, 71 Tse’irim 20 – 21, 32, 34, 37, 47, 82 Tzemach, Ada 42 Übermensch 8 – 9; Buber and 141 – 142; Eldad and 258 – 260; Hebrew Nietzscheanism and 31 – 32, 37 – 38, 44 – 45; Kurzweil and 230 – 231; Rosenzweig and 99 – 100; Zeitlin and 73 – 75, 79 – 82 Untimely Meditations (Nietzsche) 18, 67, 163 Wagner, Richard 15 – 16; Eldad and 269 – 270; Rosenzweig and 102 – 103; Scholem and 189 – 190; Zeitlin and 64 – 65, 68 – 69, 79 – 80 Weber, Alfred 91 Weber, Max 53, 150 Weininger, Otto 2, 36, 231 will-to-live 54, 89 will to power 21 – 22, 55 – 56, 100 – 101, 143 – 150, 195 – 196; Eldad and 251 – 253, 268 – 270; and the Frankist syndrome 180 – 189 Will to Power, The (Nietzsche) 14, 54, 143, 182, 252, 275 Wissenschaft des Judentums 19, 22, 233 – 235, 237 World Zionist Organization 111 “Young Hebrews” 20, 24, 229 – 230, 232, 242, 257 Yovel, Yirmiyahu 3 Zeitlin, Hillel 1 – 2, 6 – 9, 278 – 279; and autobiography 62 – 70; as Messianic visionary 51 – 57; and the schools of Hillel and Micah 57 – 62; and Shestov 70 – 75; “Thirst” 75 – 78; and the Übermensch 79 – 82 Zionism 18 – 19, 22 – 23; Buber and 111 – 112, 135 – 138; Kurzweil and 229 – 230, 235 – 236, 241 – 246; Scholem and 161 – 163, 175 – 176, 208 – 209