Note
The author highlights very interesting aspects of the current situation of Israeli Zionism, the most relevant is the assimilation of the Zionist Jews of Israel within the nation-state model of the Western societies. Moreover, by negating the reality of the exile, a general condition of the people of the world, the essence of Judaism is obliterated. These two negations constitute, for the author, the end of Judaism. This seems to be plausible, at least for the Zionist supporters of the state of Israel.
Source: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-la-fine-del-giudaismo
One cannot understand the meaning of what is happening in Israel today if one does not understand that Zionism constitutes a double negation of the historical reality of Judaism. First, by transferring to the Jews the Nation-State of the Christians, Zionism represents the culmination of that process of assimilation that, since the end of the 18th century, has progressively erased Jewish identity. Decisively, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin [1] has shown in an exemplary study, at the foundation of Zionist consciousness lies another negation, the negation of Galut, that is, of exile as a principle common to all historical forms of Judaism as we know it. The premises of the concept of exile predate the destruction of the Second Temple and are already present in biblical literature.
Exile is the very form of Jewish existence on earth, and the entire Jewish tradition, from the Mishnah to the Talmud, from the architecture of the synagogue to the memory of biblical events, was conceived and lived from the perspective of exile. For an Orthodox Jew, the Jews living in the state of Israel are also in exile. And the state according to the Torah, which the Jews await at the coming of the Messiah, has nothing to do with a modern Nation State, so much so that at its core are precisely the rebuilding of the Temple and the restoration of the sacrifices, which the state of Israel does not even want to hear about. And it is good not to forget that exile, according to Judaism, is not only the condition of the Jews but concerns the failing condition of the world in its entirety. According to some Kabbalists, including Luria [2], exile defines the very situation of the deity, who created the world by exiling himself, and this exile will last until the advent of Tiqqun [3], that is, the restoration of the original order.
It is precisely this unreserved acceptance of exile, with the rejection it entails of any present form of statehood, that grounds the superiority (high-mindedness) of the Jews over religions and peoples who have compromised with the state. The Jews are, along with the gypsies, the only people who have rejected the state form, have not waged wars and have never stained themselves with the blood of other peoples.
By denying the root of exile and diaspora in the name of a Nation-State, Zionism has therefore betrayed the very essence of Judaism. No wonder then that this removal has produced another exile, the Palestinians, and led the state of Israel to identify itself with the most extreme and ruthless forms of the modern Nation-State. The tenacious vindication of history, from which the diaspora, according to the Zionists, would have excluded the Jews, goes in the same direction. But this may mean that Judaism, which did not die at Auschwitz, perhaps knows its end today.
30 September 2024
Notes
[1] Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (1958) is an Israeli lecturer at the Ben Gurion University where he has been teaching History of Judaism. He is the author of Exil et souveraineté: judaïsme, sionisme et pensée binationale (French Edition)
[2] Isaac Luria (1534–1572) was a Jewish rabbi who produced an account of Kabbalistic thought. He is considered the father of contemporary Kabbalah.
[3] Tikkun olam ('repairing of the world') is a concept in Judaism which refers to various forms of action by the Jews intended to repair and improve the world.