Tony Blair as representative of the Middle East Quartet recently argued that understanding Islam is key to dealing with the Arab revolution that keeps rocking not only the ruling elites in the Middle East but also their relations to the West.¹ We might add that lack of religion in the West and Israel is also an issue to the extent that religion is incapable of transcending the obsolete Right-Left divide in politics. However this might be achieved by the post-secular discourse between East and West. As will become clear in the following paragraphs there are good reasons for reviewing secularism and religion and trying to get rid of political messianism that has corrupted the Enlightenment. It might also set the stage for the recovery of a souvereign human soul – the God-send arrangement that had been uprooted by the French Revolution and ever since been eclipsed by rationalist enlightenment philosophy.

At its pivotal point European existentialism, which still haunts Western modernity, almost extinguished the human soul. Sigmund Freud recognized this on his death bed after being forced into exile by the Nazis in 1938 from Vienna to London. There he expressed his shock about what he felt was the synthesis of progress and barbarity that withdrew from the masses the opium of religion - leaving no space for the soul. Freud explicitly spoke of Soviets, Nazis and Italian Fascist alike, announcing the emergence of a new realm: the result of the subordination of sensory perception to abstract ideas, which to him entailed a renunciation of drive with 'all its necessary psychological consequences'.² I am not sure if this today, with anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe at levels not seen since Freud's times, still resonates in Israeli' society, which holds on to the memory of many victims of totalitarianism like Freud. The double-bind love-hatred of much of the secular West towards Israel represents probably what's left of the Western soul. Internally though for some time now the Jewish state itself has been embroiled in a series of culture wars regarding immigration, conversions, relations to non-Jews, to Muslims and Jewish identity to name just a few.³ Inner and outer peace it seems to depend on a very similar set of issues. And yet with the Arab revolution rolling on for the foreseeable future Israel gets a unique opportunity to review its allies in the East and West.

How did this state of affairs came about? Well, National Socialism, Fascism as well as Communism, surely three of the most extreme ideologies of secularization, have left their mark in Israeli society through immigrants who fled these regimes. However only the Holocaust is widely acknowledged as such, and sort of has to carry the blame for the rest. This explains, I believe, the present ghettoization of Russian immigrants, an abundance of autonomous Russian language media and the bizarre Neo-Nazi culture which keeps flaring up there. The silence on Communist atrocities is telling us a lot about Russian immigrants, who are struggling to free themselves from their traumatic past. After their Aliyah failed, so many of them have returning to Russia, that their leader Avigor Lieberman is trying to introduce a bill on absentee ballot in order to benefit from their vote.

By contrast the influence of Western democracies such as the US, France and Britain on Israeli society remains marginal. Despite the Balfour Declaration 1917 that acknowledged a Jewish claim to their home land and the benevolent British mandate in the 1920ies and 1930ies the Zionist' militias literally bombed the representatives of the worlds oldest democracy out of Palestine. This was accompanied by a Zionist gnostic Messianism that attempted to re-translate Moses' revelation into human agency on realistic terms, on terms that allowed dualism and uncertainty to become the raison d'etre of Israel. This is why the founding hero Ben Gurion was unable to resolve the dualism of religion and state in 1947. It was his quasi-legislating letter that officially adopted the authoritarian Chief Rabbinate, founded by Rabbi Kook in 1921. This controversial institution has ever since controlled essentially private matters such as conversion and marriage resulting in relentless and antagonizing politicization of Judaism in Israel. Today here orthodox Judaism seems to be mired in a poisenous particularism that even does not shrink from open xenophobia.

This national drama resembles somehow the narrative of Gei Oni, the brilliant movie by Dan Wolman. Its main character Fanya finds a sanctuary in Palestine after escaping from pogroms in Russia at the end of the 19^th century with her little baby and her severely traumatized younger brother. However without a husband to show for she is embarrassed by her toddler who could easily stand for Judaism. The baby, whom she looks after with great devotion, is the reminder of a brutal rape by several cossacks who also murdered the rest of her family. Finding a faithful husband at last helps Fanya to get over her bad memories. This remains doubtful however for many Israelis, traumatized equally as refugees in the 20^th century. Echoes of the camp life might be detected for instance in the ingracious illumination of Israeli homes as one can easily observe even in the posh neighborhood of Jerusalem's Rehavia: large neon lights on ceilings that are supposed to keep demons of the past at bay. There are plenty of other sign of the improvised nature of the Jewish state still that has no constitution and is being paralyzed by the infighting between secular and religious factions. This suggests that after overcoming the Russian Pogroms under the Tzar it might have been to much for Israelis to cope with memories of the Holocaust and Stalin's Gulags to boot. This seems to be the elephant in the room everywhere in Israeli society and one cause of its moral exhaustion. Accordingly a special branch of historical apologetics has emerged lately, that, contrary to the established paradigm in the West, blames escalating opposition to the 18^th century Enlightenment for the Nazi Holocaust, again eclipsing the genocide of soviet Stalinism.⁴

Now the prophet Ezekiel provides us with his Gog-Magog allegory⁵ a sort of collective version of the narrative of Gei Oni. For a cossack pogrom like any other is exactly Gog running mad and taking absolute possession of what he thinks is his land Magog, just like the Nazi rage of “blood and soil”. For the Mideast today the allegory of course cuts both ways. It can mean either Israel or her Arab neighbors, mutually falling prey to each other in a struggle over the land of Palestine – acting in the Gog-Magog fashion as predator or victim respectively. The biblical counterpart to this is of course the Promised Land allegory which depicts neither a human nor a natural right but a gift of God to Israel with conditions attached to it. The Zionists avoided laizicsm exactly because they gathered that as a merely secular project they could invoke nothing for her citizens. On the other hand in orthodox Judaism the Promised Land is only to be fulfilled with the advent of the true Messiah. For without divine guidance Israel can turn into an Armageddon at any time - just as the biblical prophet Ezekiel literally tells us. It seems a perfect example of the penetrating truth of prophetic revelation that has stood the test of time. It is for this reason that the secular Zionist project seizing upon the Promised Land was ill conceived and doomed to fail - had it not been afforded legitimacy after the Holocaust.

Nevertheless Zionism set off following Russian pogroms of Jews in the second half of the 19^th century, by replacing the Hebrew Bible with the gun and by secularizing its language - basically implementing a socialist regime in the Middle East and ignoring or even loathing the monotheist genius loci. The re-transplant of a Jewish diaspora to their roots in the Orient was organized by Russian and German Zionists. Many of them were followers of Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Klages, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche rather than Moses. The secular Zionists succeeded mainly thanks to the wave of fervent nationalism that predated WW I. Besides socialism the gnostic vitalist philosophy, particularly dominant at the turn of the 20^th century in Germany, was a lasting influence on these early Zionists.⁶ In addition German and Russian Jewish emigrants maintained a tight network with their countries of departure that served as intellectual reference with a huge impact on the formation of the new Jewish State.

What was left of Judaism comprised mostly of a Kabbalah that had incubated a measure of racial and xenophobic prejudice during the 400odd years of eastern European rabbinical scripture.⁷ Gershom Scholem, the doyen in this field and a towering academic in Israel used to keep a blind eye on this embarrassing fact. To his credit however, it was against his admonitions in accord with other moderate Zionists like Chaim Waizmann that the founders of Israel failed to develop good neighborly relations with the indigenous Arabs - even though this was stipulated in the Balfour declaration in exchange for granting the Jews a homeland in Palestine.⁸ Admittedly this failure is also to be accounted to French and British colonial interests. But then again mainstream Zionists adamantly rejected an offically bilingual Palestine to begin with that would have allowed the authentic teaching of Arabic history and culture at their schools – a fatal mistake that still jeopardizes the existence of Israel. In addition the Ashkenazim marginalized the indigenous Sephardim who had been at reasonable terms with their Muslim neighbors for centuries.⁹ The credit Zionists earned for making peace at least with Egypt and Jordan came late and is about to expire. However unwise the Zionist set up has been in the first place, they certainly gave hope to the Jews when they needed it dearly. But the ill advised plan prevailed decades later with the contentious transfer of another 1.2 million Russian immigrants comprising again extremely secularized Jews. These Russian Jews in Israel, mostly lacking democratic credentials, have become an unpredictable and destabilizing element in Israeli politics - perfectly represented in the conduct of Avigdor Liebermann who as Foreign Minister displays unfettered disrespect for Israeli Arabs and apparently represents the Gog-Magog school of thinking in Israel.

Today any Western visitor might be probably puzzled by the prevailing socialist features and the salient lack of good manners in Israel: just try to cue anywhere or jump on a bus in Jerusalem with all the elbowing, bickering and pushing. Another example is Mount Herzl and its hagiographic Zionist museum. One may be forgiven for being tempted to compare the triumphalist architecture of Herzl's tomb with Churchill's humble grave in the churchyard of Bladon-with-Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Humility in antiquity used to be the beacon of Jewish virtues, contrasting it to proverbial Greek pride. In the Talmud God states without any ambiguity: “There ain't room enough in this world for your Ego and Me. You pick.” Unlike Herzl not even Stalin got his own posthumous mountain and on Mount Rushmore four adored former American presidents have to share one between them. There are many other signs of radical secularization in Israeli society, such as the latest crop of humanistic Judaism,¹⁰ allegedly the answer to exhausted Western civilization. Truly pagan it boasts of a folklorist Jewish custom that dispenses of God altogether. This “non theistic” branch of Judaism is taught by people still pretending to be Rabbis. Now, this is precisely what the former socialist German Democratic Republic had achieved with a pseudo-Christian Jugendweihe. These are theologico-political arrangements that put Israel pretty much on the trajectory of an ultra-secular scenario, reminding us of a branch of Judaism that emerged in early 20^th century Germany.

In that nascent nation around 1870 tainted with a self-assertive nationalism, German Jews were firmly put on the road of assimilation leading them to join in the fighting on their hosts side of WW I in large numbers. Turned pacifist in the wake of Versailles, Jewish leaders went on to found a German Zion in the Weimar Republic. It is in this context that Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber endeavored a new translation of the Hebrew-Bible - a translation that resulted in a sophisticated Germanization with clearly voelkisch undertones. It's publication in 1925 met with a blaze of criticism. For Rosenzweig/Buber tried to transliterate the Hebrew root structure into German, by that inevitably alienating it to any natural speaker. More importantly Rosenzweig and Buber also fell for the existentialist Zeitgeist. It was in this vein that they actually corrupted the Bible text - a step back from what the Luther Bible had achieved in terms of a readable gospel for everybody. But not only that: the Luther rendering of key concepts of the Bible matches in important ways todays Torah reading of such brainy Jewish scholars as Jonathan Sacks, London's Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth. Here is where they match: “I will be that, which I will be” - the rendering of Gods answer to Moses' famous inquiry, who the Lord actually was, in future tense. According to Sacks this wording perfectly captures the expectations of orthodox Anglo-Jewry today putting the emphasis on any possible challenge the future may hold for them.¹¹

This is a wise reading for it avoids to pin down the Lord to narrow human longings. Another way of putting this is to say that prophesies are never certain and are all about taking risks, enabled by our trust in God - for isn't that really what religion comes down to? Again Rosenzweig/Buber rendered this in their existentialist ways - familiar to us as todays popular cultures' accessibility effect - where Gods reassuring answer is rendered: “I will be-there, as that which I will be-there” suggesting the Almighty's immediate assistance and indicating a return of idolatrous anthropomorphism. This is also prevalent in the replacement of Luther's correct transcendental “sein” (being) with authenticist' or existentialist' “dasein” (being-close by), or Luther's cosmopolitan rendering of Hebrew eretz “welt” (world) as “erdvolk”, slapped at the time by Siegfried Kracauer as “earth mysticism”.¹² It is no coincidence that this corresponded to the Heiddegerian project of incorporating the Hellenized Christian God to the Third Realm – an attempt often referred to as his onto-theology. However in their own words Rosenzweig and Buber intended nothing less than to renew biblical revelation. What they actually achieved was at the time labeled as archaic modernism, comparable to shocking Russian art works such as Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps. Strange enough, their mystification was complementary to the hastened profanization of the Hebrew language of the Zionists. Even though the Rosenzweig/Buber Bible remains one of the most bizarre works in German literature and it is also a striking example of metaphysical engineering of Jewish identity or of political messianism.¹³

Now, Eli Gorden has shown, that Rosenzweig was actually more of a German than a Jewish thinker given his existentialist credentials and his affinity to Martin Heidegger. Just imagine the implications of this fact for the role Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig would come to play later in the foundation of a new academia in Israel. Even in England Rosenzweig survived in the latest edition of the orthodox Jewish prayer book, also edited by Jonathan Sacks. There his catchy formula of “redemption is the application of revelation to creation” is commented in the affirmative even though it displays sort of secular Hegelian dialectics.¹⁴

This lasting influence is important because the common platform which Rosenzweig and Heidegger shared was gnostic, categorized in Eric Voegelin's work as immanentization which is nothing less than submerging reason in close-mindedness or, in other words attempting to pin down the divine and remote Being - as opposed to openness within divine transcendence. One sure mark of this is the existentialist replacement of Gods eternity with profane human timeliness – back then called temporal instead of transcendental hermeneutics. This is of course also the linchpin of the pagan Gog-Magog narrative. As such it eventually ushered in the very people that would not bother of anything humanitarian, so that the German Zion was utterly destroyed by the juggernaut of “German Christians”. This was a thoroughly gnostic denomination forged together like “blood and soil”. However existentialist religion seems to have at least some merit since according to Irving Kristol it helped liberating him from rationalism. Kristol being asked as a twenty-something whether he really believed in God’s existence, rejected the question as irrelevant; his relation to God was existential, not rationalist, Kristol argued: “[A] religious person doesn’t ‘believe’ in God, he has faith in God.”¹⁵

However this may be, I prefer to look at this closer at home - the Mideast and its theologico-political genius loci, which brings us to T. E. Lawrence's “Semitic religiosity”. Lawrence of Arabia, as he later became to be known, studied the desert Bedouins very carefully and gave us this fascinating account, greatly admired by Winston Churchill:¹⁶ “Their largest manufacture was of creeds: almost they were monopolists of revealed religions. Three of these efforts had endured among them: two of the three had also born export (on modified forms) to non-Semitic peoples. Christianity, translated into the diverse spirits of Greek and Latin and Teutonic tongues, had conquered Europe and America. Islam in various transformations was subjecting Africa and parts of Asia. These were Semitic successes. Their failures they kept to themselves. The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faiths..... “.

This is why there is plenty of common ground between the Abrahamic creeds. For many centuries, as Lawrence describes meticulously, there have been sort of natural cycles of Bedouin wanderings that started in Yemen, since times immemorial a crowded place, where expanding tribes of Muslim nations arrived on their trading routes from the Indian ocean. Lawrence observed: “It was significant that this wrack of fallen religions lay about the meeting of the desert and the sown. It pointed to the generation of all these creeds. They were assertions, not arguments; so they required a prophet to set them forth.” Among the Arabs was a saying that over time there had emerged as much as forty thousand prophets, whereas Jews and Christians accounted just for a few hundred. Whatever the numbers, Christians' perennial flocking to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Muslims' once in a lifetime Pilgrimage to Mekka as one of the five pillars of Islam and Jewish attachment to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the tradition of the Succot festival – they all refer to the genius loci of revelation.

The lives of these prophets followed one recognizable pattern: born in cities or crowded places such as in Yemen they were eventually driven into the desert and then..., we hear Lawrence again, “they returned with their imagined message articulate, to preach it to their old, and now doubting, associates. The founders of the three great creeds fulfilled this cycle...not probably that they found God dwelling there, but that in its solitude they heard more certainly the living word they brought with them. The common base of all Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness.” Lawrence concluded that his Arab companions were turning to “things in which mankind had had no share or part”, which serves as an acknowledgment of the invisible hand of God as a transcendent source of human freedom. This shared monotheist vision of God's nature is a powerful anti-thesis to the Rousseauan battle cry for humans to embrace their archaic ancestors as the supposedly unspoiled human beings – something that could have inspired the archaic features of the Rosenzweig/Buber Bible and Stravinsky's music. It would not take long that what Rousseau wished for would come true in the explosion of secular and atheist modernity in France, Germany, Italy and Russia entangled with each other like Gog and Magog – it's fire melting the thin layer of human civilization and freedom away while descending into the clashes of messianic regimes.

The truth of the Gog-Magog allegory has been scientifically established in our time by, to name just a few, the late Eric Voegelin¹⁷ and more recently by Menachem Kellner¹⁸. The latter looked at Maimonides in a way demonstrating that in enlightened Judaism there is no such thing as the Holy Land, City or Language. The essence of the Torah could have been equally revealed to the American Navajos in their very language and to the same effect. In this same sense astute Theodor Herzl was prepared to accept the Uganda Plan, proposed to him by the British government. That he died of a “broken heart” within a year after the Zionist Congress of 1903 had voted it down, shows how deeply commited Herzl was.

Today in the wake of the global financial crisis there is a discourse going on about the post-secular society, that addresses the challenge of divine revelation as a source of wisdom.¹⁹ This post-secular discourse of the West could certainly assuage the Israeli cultural divide.²⁰ For it might open up a way to reconcile its warring secular and religious factions. Without Israel finding a new post-Zionist consensus, identity and inner peace it seems very unlikely that she is ready for peace with her neighbors - for both conflicts depend on a new post-secular embracing of monotheism, meaning foremost a de-politicization and an abandonment of the Left-Right schism. However the post-secular scenario requires the Israeli public to decide whether she wants to be just another run-of-the-mill democracy or rather preserve their unique Jewish tradition within an Islamic context of monotheism.

Now let me close with a remark on antisemitism. The Semites are, incorrectly as Lawrence notes, commonly understood as only part of the multi-tongued people of the Middle Eastern family they denote. Lawrence asserts that in fact the Semites historically encompassed all the tongues in the region which are not only Arabic, but also, indicating a common origin, Assyrian, Babylonian, Phoenician, Aramaic, Syriac and last not least Hebrew. And it is for this reason that the word antisemitism, as usually understood only regarding Jews, incorrectly excludes a whole gambit of Semitic populations that happen to be Israels neighbors today. Throughout the West this eventually led more recently to the new label of Islamophobia, which reveals a transfer of abhorrence previously attached to homosexuals or animals, as in homophobia or arachnophobia, to Muslims in general. This is typical rationalist enlightenment or political correct fare, for it uses separations without any understanding of the organic reality on the ground. Now, biologism and ethnicity being a Nazi trademark, was something the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were keen to replace with cultural or spiritual identity.

Revealingly the term antisemitism emerged at the same time - late 19th century - in Germany as the scientific term Judaism and was meant to ennoble increasing hatred of Jews with an “enlightened” or scientific term. With science at the time undergoing a major crisis after Alfred Einstein's relativity theory, biology clutched the top rank of the sciences from foundering physics and gave birth to utterly biased racial eugenics. These were later completely discredited. The term antisemitism nevertheless survived after WW II until today probably because of growing Western distress with Islam. This tempted Westerners to repudiate the historically very close ties between Judaism and Islam, in order to display and strengthen the much less significant Judeo-Christian ties. However the strong medieval Jewish-Islamic link rests on a solid foundation of revealed law, whereas the post-enlightenment revisionist Judeo-Christian link rotates around miracles, mysticism and Kabbalah as exemplified with the existentialist theology of Scholem, Buber, Tillich, Rosenzweig and others. So in the post-secular world there is no place for the term antisemitism denoting Anti-Jewishness and no justification for the synonymous use of anti-Zionism. Post-secularism requires the term antisemitism to be returned to its etymological root that includes all Semites. If this were accepted policy, the Middle East would probably be a much better place.

 

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Notes