Exodus from self inflicted Enlightenment

Jewish Quarterly Review, 2009

De Gruyter eBooks, 2015

In addition to the papers presented at the workshop, we have included a few extra contributions that round out our reflections. The workshop and the present volume aim at revisiting interesting and important aspects of the German-Jewish experience and evaluating the present state of the field. Senior and junior scholars from Israel, Germany, and the United States all contributed to this work. We shall not summarize the arguments and theses of the essays in this collection. After all, what would be the point of reading them if one knows in advance what they are going to say? Readers will, no doubt, perceive some methodological, analytic, generational, and national divergences in these pieces but what emerges clearly is the ongoing vitality of this field, which in many ways is in transition. New paradigms, methods, and approaches co-exist with other more familiar and tried analyses. In the Postscript, we try to provide a retrospective account of the state of things as reflected in this volume. We would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem, particularly the encouragement and organizational help of Dr. Anja Siegemund. We are most grateful to Dr. Ulrike Krauss, our main contact person with our publisher de Gruyter for her commitment to the book series "Perspectives on Jewish texts and contexts" and for accompanying every stage of the production process of this volume. Above all, we want to thank Dr. Stefani Hoffman, who did much more for this book than her work as text editor would have required. With utmost professionalism and a fine sense for language, she painstakingly went through every line of the manuscript, suggested corrections and revisions at every level and contributed immensely to improving this book. As noted by Nils Roemer (2005,, until the end of the eighteenth century, Jewish history was regarded as the realm of God's action -for Jews and Christians alike. According to the traditional Christian concept of salvation history, the People of Israel were endowed with a definite, central role as God's chosen people and as the first "nation of believers." This view emphasized Abraham's universal role as "the father of believers" [Vater der Gläubigen], God's instrument for delivering the true faith to humanity, "that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ" (Galatians 3:14). According to this notion, God's covenant with Abraham inaugurated the third chapter in his relationship with humanity, following those with Adam and with Noah. Many orthodox Christian theologians of the eighteenth century also adhered to this belief. For instance, the chronicle Introduction to Universal History [Einleitung zu der Universal-Historie], published by Pietist scholar Johann Friedrich Hochstetter (1698-?) in 1740, explains Abraham's appearance on the stage of history solely within the context of the history of faith: "From the moment humans began to disperse across the earth, they gradually forgot God and became more and more immersed in despicable idolatry; and that is what made God take Abraham, son of Terah, out of Chaldea, where his community had dwelt, and reestablish in his home the rite of the true god" (Hochstetter 1740, 7). This narrative, which features in the many biblical chronicles written in the context of sacred history, attributes one basic meaning to the Israelites' origin: humanity's first shedding of idolatry and ignorance, which was to culminate with the arrival of Christ. Abraham's appearance on the historical scene signifies the transformation from an age of idolatry to an age of belief in the True God [Verehrung des wahren Gottes]. Many of these texts, therefore, include an extensive description of the expansion of idolatry in the stage preceding the Israelites' history. Church historians generally held the view that the sons of Ham -especially the Egyptians and the Canaanites -spread idolatry in the world. Belief in the one true God remained intact only among the sons of Shem, even while idolatry spread among the rest of humankind. This account, therefore, deals with the transmission of tradition, religion, faith, or ancient divine knowledge. It accords Abraham and his progeny a special place at the center of world history for their sole function as bearers of the faith. The narrative presents Abraham as a link in a chain beginning with Adam and Noah and continuing through David and Jesus. Whether depicting a seamless transmission of knowledge from Noah to Abraham or describing the renewal of the True Faith following God's revelation

Intellectual History Review September 2013

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 1991

article, 2024

In my essay, I want to focus on what, for me, constitutes Eric Santner’s greatest achievement: the brilliant psychoanalytic reinterpretation of the crucial symbol of Judaism – yetziat mitzrayim, the “getting out of Egypt” – as “the Exodus out of our own Egyptomania.” Although formulated in his book on Rosenzweig and Freud, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, it appears in all Santner’s later works concerned with political theology, where “Egyptomania” stands for everything that overburdens human life with an excessive “signifying stress” or “ex-citation” (On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life 31), weighing it down with the impossible demands of the ultimate metaphysical self-justification and the interpellating call to sublimity. Contrary to Hegel’s famous definition of Judaism as “the religion of the sublime” (Philosophy of History 196), Santner consequently champions the opposite view, according to which the Abrahamic revelation forms the first religion of radical desublimation that blocks the vertical transport into the extraordinary “beyond” and focuses instead on the immanent transcendence as the radical otherness of the neighbour/stranger in the world.

Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 41, 1996

This text appeared in Bamidbar. Journal for Jewish Though and Philosophy, nr 4/2014

The German Quarterly 86, no. 3, 2013

In this article I argue that behind the central image of the Ostjude in the Weimar German-Jewish renaissance were twenty years of collaboration and cultural exchange between German Jews and resident Eastern European Jews. I aver that a transnational examination of German-Jewish visual culture reveals the way in which Eastern European Jews helped to fashion their own image in German society. I investigate the bookplate, or ex libris, as a cultural product in the fin-de-siècle,when Jewish iconography rose in popularity. Immigrant Eastern European Jews living in Germany produced and circulated the positive image of the bearded Jew with yarmulke, providing broader German-Jewish society a visual vocabulary for conveying their own idealized selves.