Thinking Proleptically: Paul Mendes-Flohr on Intellectual History as Second-Person Dialogue

Abstract

The current article argues that Paul Mendes-Flohr’s turn to address contemporary challenges faced by Jews at large, and Israeli Jews in particular, is proleptic in the sense that it excavates the anticipation of the current intellectual, spiritual and moral reality from the intellectual history of modern German−Jewish thought. Based on a reading of his recent book, Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities, the discussion shows how Mendes-Flohr’s adaptation of Martin Buber’s call to aspire to I−Thou relations supports proleptic historiography both as a historiographical methodology and as a moral act.

1. Introduction

Prolepsis, an ancient Greek term adopted by Latin that made its way into English, means anticipation (OED 2021b). Already in the Greek, the term assumed very specific forms of anticipation. According to Liddell Scott, it mainly denoted the anticipation of an occurrence at a specific point in time, or alternatively, an anachronism (Liddell et al. 2000). Following the Latin, in English language usage prolepsis assumed functions in grammar and rhetoric, retaining the forward-looking orientation of the literal meaning of the term. In his work, Paul Mendes-Flohr has used prolepsis extensively to explain the unique experience of communities of faith poised to accommodate an eternal dimension within life in the present. He has relied on this notion most extensively in his studies on Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), whose thought attempted to reveal and articulate divine presence in the midst of Jewish congregational life.1

The current article argues that Mendes-Flohr’s turn to address contemporary challenges faced by Jews at large, and Israeli Jews in particular, is proleptic in the sense that it excavates the anticipation of the current intellectual, spiritual and moral reality from the intellectual history of modern German−Jewish thought. The discussion will focus on Mendes-Flohr’s most comprehensive engagement with this mode of research, his recently-published Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities (Mendes-Flohr 2021b; heretofore: CD). As such, this proleptic mode of historiography embodies the ideal of second-person dialogue, I−Thou relation, which the current issue celebrates in honor of Mendes-Flohr’s life’s work.

Who is the I and who is the Thou in this dialogue? In his seminal I and Thou (Buber 2000), Martin Buber (1878–1965) suggests that one’s relations with one’s surroundings assume one of two courses: either an objectifying relationship in which the I (Ich) considers her surroundings (be they persons, animals or items), as means to ends and views them as an “it” (Es); or an organic relationship in which the I identifies with her surroundings but does not unify with them, viewing persons, animals and items comprising this immediate environment as a Thou (Du). I−It relations are utilitarian: “One’s fundamental relation with the It-world [Eswelt] encompasses the experiences [Erfahren] that always constitute the [It-] world anew, and the forms of use [Gebrauchen] that lead the [It-] world to its multifarious goal, the sustenance, alleviation and provision of human life” (Buber 2000, p. 48).2 Life in the It-world may lead to “acquisition of knowledge” for the sake of professional specialization. The progress this activity yields from a utilitarian perspective is offset by the necessity to replace unmediated experience with mediated experience. That is, just like scientific work, the benefits of the objectification of our surroundings come at the price of self-distancing from the world, diluting one’s capacity to relate [Beziehungskraft] and creating a hindrance or obstacle [Hindernis] that prevents one from living a life of Spirit (Buber 2000, p. 48). It is hoped that the meaning of “living a life of Spirit” through historical research will become clearer later on in the article; at this juncture it will suffice to suggest that a dialogical approach to intellectual history should amount to more than the mere objectification of one’s historical surroundings; that is, one’s subject of study.

Establishing I−Thou relations, Buber continues, effects a fundamental change to one’s orientation in reality:

The world of It is set in the context of space and time.

The world of Thou is not set in the context of either of these.

Its context is in the center, where the extended lines of relations meet—in the eternal Thou. […]

In virtue of this privilege, formative power belongs to the world of Thou: spirit can penetrate and transform the world of It. In virtue of this privilege we are not given up to alienation from the world and the loss of reality by the I—to domination by the ghostly.

(Buber 2000, p. 97)

I−Thou relations, or dialogue, extract one from the strictures of space and time and open up the possibility of becoming aware of the eternal Thou, who is none other than God. Placed in the context of intellectual history, such dialogue between the present and the past may be understood as dissolving the subject−object relation with which we are accustomed to frame historical research, like any other scientific activity. Attunement to a given intellectual heritage could transform ideas and texts into teachings, historical figures into companions. Another relation that dialogue may dissolve is that between the temporal categories of “present” and “past”. Approaching our given intellectual challenges synchronically, that is, in isolation from their chronological dimension (as one might say, “frozen in time”), we may merge ideas and the reactions they shape to given problems, different contexts, circumstances and settings (social, religious, political, geographical). It must be stressed, however, that this synchronic mode of reflection is not tantamount to philosophical abstraction that seeks to examine the concepts and arguments de-contextualized altogether. Proleptic intellectual history keeps in mind the specific contexts of ideas and texts, statements and actions, and retains the right to invoke them in the course of the synchronic reflection when the need arises.

A dialogical mode of intellectual historiography may also open up the cultural universe that constitutes the given historical context, to include unexpected and seemingly unrelated materials from different cultural−historical contexts. Such insertions may nonetheless shed light on possible affinities between the study’s primary subject matter and other subject matters: genres (a poem in a theological discussion); eras (an ancient text in a modern period study); and cultural legacies (an American song in a German context).3

Mendes-Flohr’s scholarship is known for its detail-sensitive inquiry, philological precision and sensitivity to context, mood and mindset. His own major proleptic study, Cultural Disjunctions, makes scant use of the terminus technicus, and yet one may suggest that this could be due to the book’s performative embodiment of the anticipatory openness to the future that the term denotes. It is complemented by a polemical piece Mendes-Flohr wrote for the online magazine of Jewish renewal movement Tikkun. “Cri de Coeur. Lachrymose Reflections on Israeli−Palestinian Relations” (Mendes-Flohr 2021a), demonstrates the activistic potential of proleptic histories. The acute crisis in East Jerusalem neighborhood Sheikh Jarrah is addressed by highlighting its historical−intellectual roots, a move that exposes Jewish intellectuals’ prescient insights regarding the inescapable responsibility that the Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel places on Jews’ shoulders. By contrast, Cultural Disjunctions is structured thematically to form a kaleidoscopic portrait of the modern Jewish condition, simultaneously understanding modernity as a long durée, as well as the immediate past and the ongoing present. Considered in tandem, Cultural Disjunctions and “Cri de Coeur” make a notable scholarly gesture which, one should hope, will prove an important milestone in the evolution of proleptic historiography as a dialogical practice.

2. A Long Tradition

There is a rather long and respectable line of historical studies whose impact far exceeded the research community to which they were addressed. A random list might include Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon 1999), Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (de Tocqueville 2012), Michel Foucault’s History of Madness (Foucault 2006), Edward Said’s Orientalism (Said 1978), and Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (Huntington 2002).

Studies in Jewish history certainly partake in this trend: Heinrich Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden (Graetz 1900–1909), Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Scholem 1978), or E.E. Urbach’s The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs (Urbach 1975), may all be said to be (at least in part), commentaries on the present in which they were composed by way of historical research. In this sense, they certainly contain proleptic attitudes to varying degrees, but as self-professed histories they lack, or heavily camouflage, hidden dialogical elements.

In Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Yerushalmi 1996), Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi traces the arc of Jewish historiography and reflects on its relation to Jewish collective memory. He opens his concluding chapter with the following declaration: “I live within the awareness that the very mode in which I delve into the Jewish past represents a decisive break with the past” (p. 81). This divisive relation, according to Yerushalmi, is an outcome of Jewish emancipation at the dawn of the Enlightenment, following which religious tradition had lost its exclusive hold on Jewish consciousness: social, cultural, political and even economic orientation ceased to be the necessary derivative of the halakhic system, rabbinic authority and communal cohesion. The immediate impact of this break in Jewish historiography is the emergence of a conviction among the pioneers of modern Jewish research, members of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, that, “[…] there must be an essential ‘Idea of Judaism’ behind the shifting forms that history casts up to our view, and believed that this idea could be distilled by the historian” (p. 92). Yerushalmi’s conclusion is that, “The task [of historians] can no longer be limited to finding continuities in Jewish history, or even ‘dialectical’ ones.” The suggested course of action he presents, however, is cautious and speculative: “Perhaps the time has come to look more closely at ruptures, breaks, to identify them more precisely, to see how Jews endured them […]” (p. 101).

Such “rupture aware” historiography certainly has its merits. Yet, it will struggle to sustain a dialogical relation with the past, and will eschew its proleptic potential. This is so because despite Jewish history’s endless catalogue of ruptures and breaks, failure to move beyond it imposes severe limitations on our ability to explore either side of the watershed called the modern era.4

Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind. On Political Reaction (Lilla 2016), may be seen as an experiment in proleptic intellectual history offering a radical alternative to Yerushalmi’s “rupture awareness.” Instead of searching for continuities, Lilla charts byways connecting the legacy of three thinkers—Franz Rosenzweig, Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) and Leo Strauss (1899–1973)—(the first and third are Jewish) and the culmination of reactionary politics in the form of international Islamist terrorism. Lilla is particularly interested in the role of nostalgia as a shaping factor of political reaction, which in the current intellectual climate had become opaque as, “The more charmed we have become with our individual psyches, the less adept we have become at understanding the psychology of nations, peoples, religions and political movements.” He therefore presents his study as a modest attempt to resist a reality in which, “[…] the present has become so illegible to us” (Lilla 2016, p. xxi). Lilla hedges the risk of being exposed to methodological critiques by describing his study as offering “[…] a series of examples and reflections rather than a systematic treatise on the concept of reaction” (p. xv). This approach offers the benefit of facilitating the identification of links with the political present, by pointing out ideational similarities that do not depend on direct historical relations, or on outcomes of causal processes. In this sense, Lilla’s method may be said to be dialogical as it rises above categories and distinctions (e.g., modern Jewish philosophy and Islamist ideology), to reflect on the links between nostalgia and reactionary politics and their resonances, past and present. However, in another sense, this deliberate elision of systematic methodology shifts the study’s center of gravity away from Jewish thought and over to a rather loose affinity of ideas. Such an outcome is more conducive to an analysis of contemporary political−cultural reality than to a reflection on the past and present as participants in eye-level dialogue.

In a bold and creative attempt to rethink the potential of the intellectual legacy of German−Jewish thinkers, Vivian Liska has recently conflated it with three discourses, each framed temporally: “German−Jewish modernism; postmodernism, in its deconstructive variant; and the current period, which is sometimes called ‘theory after theory,’ but which does not yet have a name” (Liska 2017, p. 3). While the Enlightenment plays an important role in German−Jewish thinkers’ response to modernity, the historical moment she identifies as the watershed in their historical consciousness is the, “[…] association of assimilation and bourgeoisie, a mode of life they despised” (pp. 3–4). This approach supports the book’s thematic structure, which intentionally suspends the conventional expectation for diachrony (p. 6). The protagonists of Liska’s study5 had had only cursory knowledge of Jewish sources, and hence her study employs the term “Jewish tradition” as a loose repository of ideas constitutive of Jewish modernity: “The transmission of tradition, the relation between law and narrative, messianism—particularly messianic language—and the interconnection between exile, remembrance and exemplarity […]” (p. 6).

Highly illuminating of the dialogue between German−Jewish thought and the three discursive-temporal strata Liska identifies (to recall: the thinkers’ modern present, postmodern deconstruction and post-theoretical approaches), such employment of the notion of tradition renders it an impregnably opaque subject of study. In her exploration of the historiographic potential of belles lettres, Liska crafts a moment of dialogical sublimity in her reading of the epistolary and personal relationship of Paul Celan (1920–1970) and Austrian poetess Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973). The daughter of a member of the Austrian National Socialist Party, Bachmann was the antipodean Other to Celan, a Jewish labor camp survivor whose parents perished in the Transnistria concentration camp. Liska singles out a line from a poem Celan had penned early in his correspondence with Bachmann: “Ich bin du, wenn Ich bin.” Liska translates it as “I am you when I am I” (p. 139). Out of context, this line may be taken to encapsulate, and even exceed the ideal interpersonal encounter Buber envisions in Ich und Du: total immersion in the other facing the self through absolute self-acceptance. Articulated with theological language, this is a moment of unio mystica—one’s unification with God as the culmination of a concerted mental effort. Liska’s interpretation exposes the impossibility of such a reading, which arises from history’s intervention in the Celan−Bachmann relationship. Ridden with guilt for having failed to save his parents’ lives, and for having survived the horrors of the Holocaust, Celan was painfully aware of the indissoluble difference between a Jewish survivor and a young descendant of Nazi followers, who matriculated from high school in relative safety during the war, and entered university immediately after the war’s end (p. 140).

The failure to establish amorous second-person intimacy with the ultimate Other in a post-Holocaust reality provides an example of the omnipotence of historical intervention. No matter how close, not matter how attached to one another, individuals placed on the opposite sides of history are unable to consummate their mutual attraction—intellectually, spiritually or romantically—but will never stop trying.6 Notably, historical interventions such as the Holocaust or the founding of the State of Israel do not disrupt Liska’s synchronic program. Instead, they add further depth to her stratified conception of Jewish history.

Thus, Zionism as code for the Israeli−Palestinian conflict, and universalism as code for trends in post-theoretical discourse inspired by Pauline Christianity, frame Liska’s discussion of the legacy of German−Jewish thought in the twenty-first century. Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Alan Badiou are three prominent voices in the discourse with which Liska engages. Her conclusion, however nuanced, is that the expectation from Jews to join the universalist cause (Zizek, Badiou), or alternatively the assertion that exile is the epitome of the Jewish condition that Zionism disrupts (Butler), strives to efface Jewish existence. Or in Liska’s own words at the conclusion of her response to Badiou: “Badiou’s universalism thus requires divesting the Jew of any historical, national, ethnic, or religious particularity” (p. 155).

3. Between Rupture and Disjunction

The title of Liska’s study stages the legacy of German−Jewish thought as having an afterlife without declaring its death. By keeping the transition from life to afterlife open to speculation, she appears to elide the “rupture awareness” permeating Jewish historiography, and reap the fruits of her endorsement of ambiguity. The title of Mendes-Flohr’s book expresses a different approach. Its header, Cultural Disjunctions, acknowledges Jewish history’s susceptibility to disruption, while mitigating somewhat the violence of Yerushalmi’s notion of rupture. The OED defines disjunction as, “The action of disjoining or condition of being disjoined, separation, disconnection, disunion” (OED 2021a). By implication, in order to become disjointed, the object must have been connected to that from which it has separated. According to Mendes-Flohr, disjunction occurred when Jewish peoplehood became “sundered from its religious moorings” (CD, p. 13). By contrast, rupture is “a break, tear or split in a surface or substance […] also in figurative context” (OED 2021c). Use of the term shifts our attention to the intervention of an external force imposing the separation. Hence, disjunction sustains the possibility of dialogue with a historical reality irretrievably lost, despite the inevitable separation from it. Mendes-Flohr stresses that this possibility does not preclude further contradictions and tensions: “the dialogue does not void cognitive dissonance” (p. 9). While this observation is made regarding the openness of post-traditional (disjunctive) Jews to the traditional corpus of Jewish teachings and to other literary corpora, it may very well apply to the majority, if not all the dimensions of his study: temporal and ontological horizons, exile and homeland, orthodoxy and reconstruction, faith and atheism, to name but a few.

An antidote to the book’s title, its structure outlines a clear trajectory that begins with the dilemmas of Jewish identity in the long and winding aftermath of Jewish Emancipation, a state Mendes-Flohr characterizes, we recall, as post-traditional. This state, as described in the book’s first chapter, is neither terminal nor static: despite prophecies to the contrary, Orthodox Judaism did not meet its demise, Zionism (primarily as embodied by the State of Israel) proved far more than a whimsical revolutionary movement, yet failed to provide a definitive answer to the pressing question “Who is a Jew?” (pp. 15–17). The father of modern Orthodoxy, the Hatam Sofer, has triumphed over the torch-bearer of Jewish Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn,7 but the values of the Haskalah continue to guide the majority of world Jewry. Life in Israel has made intercultural encounters “safe” for Jews, in the sense of being far less susceptible to assimilation than their non-Israeli brethren, yet pushed secular Israeli Jews close to the abyss of spiritual vacuity (p. 20).

This hyper-dynamic state renders nigh impossible the task of finding a secure foothold for a stable, coherent and cohesive Jewish identity. Though it may be seen as dangerous, such a reality might simply be complex. Embracing complexity as the baseline, and conceding that it simultaneously operates on two levels—personal and collective—seems like a healthy response. Seeking guidance in this maze of possibilities, Mendes-Flohr cites Gustav Landauer (1870–1919): “I have never felt the need to simplify myself or to create an artificial unity by way of denial; I accept my [cultural] complexity and hope to be an even more multifarious unity than I am aware of being” (p. 21).

The five chapters that follow proceed along a sequence of constitutive elements of identity. Some are generic, others are specifically Jewish. We might say that Landauer’s personal statement articulates with precision the implicit message of the title of Mendes-Flohr’s book: the fundamental challenge of modern life is how to come to terms with multiplicity: of identities, alternatives, approaches, viewpoints. Reductionism is not an option. We may note that the nouns in the book’s title—in both its header and subtitle—are in the plural (disjunctions, identities); by contrast, Yerushalmi warns against rupture, Lilla delves into the shipwrecked mind and Liska searches for the aftermath of German−Jewish thought; all in the singular. This is hardly coincidental. Mendes-Flohr’s discussions in Cultural Disjunctions consistently address either multiplicity or plurality. Historical examples are not isolated for the sake of analysis; they corroborate a certain aspect of a constellation of possibilities—some actualized, some not. To be sure, as Lilla notes, the enormous burden of having to forge one’s path through endless possibilities is not only personal, but scholarly as well. Clearly, research cannot rest content with an open-ended presentation of findings. Interpretation must lead to conclusions, which by nature are close-ended: the scholar should argue why things are to be understood this way and not otherwise. An undifferentiated mass of details loses its richness and becomes an inscrutable monolith.

Cultural Disjunctions is not a systematic historical study, to be sure. It gains its coherence from a thematic survey of key questions. Granted, such an approach cannot sustain, in and of itself, the methodological foundation of intellectual historical research writ large; and indeed, Mendes-Flohr relies on decades of scholarly work conducted with conventional methodologies defined by the task of contextualization, framed by linear chronology, and loyal to the highest standards of historical accuracy and consistency. Followers of Mendes-Flohr’s work will recognize certain anecdotes and observations that have appeared in former studies.8 However, the characterization of his historical approach in the book as proleptic also implies a leap—taken from the solid ground of his research—toward ambitious goals.

Although these goals are not explicitly articulated in the book, two of them may be pointed out with relative confidence. First, to arrive at a formulation of Jewish identity that is versatile, cohesive, and accommodating of multiplicity, while delineating a center of gravity, or core, of the meaning of being a Jew in the twenty-first century. Second, to identify a Jewish creed, a modern and modest version of attempts to formulate principles of Judaism (called in medieval Hebrew Ikkarim),9 which may be shown to run like a thread through the whole of Jewish history. The proleptic character of the discussion arises from Mendes-Flohr’s interpretation of the legacy of German−Jewish thinkers as relevant to the present realities of Jewish life from the eighteenth century onwards.

Chapters 2–410 address the book’s first goal, i.e., offering a formulation of Jewish identity. Mendes-Flohr suggests a list of Cs, as “a complex of distinctive but ultimately overlapping phenomena,” taking after a similar formulation of Bishop Kenneth Cragg (1913–2012) in relation to Islam: creed, cult, community, code (Halakhah), covenant, and less expectedly, cuisine and comedy as well (CD, p. 28). While he does not follow this list systematically later on, Mendes-Flohr does provide an enlightening reference to illustrate the continuity of Jewish cultural memory: Heinrich Heine’s (1797–1856) ode to his mother’s traditional Sabbath stew, the cholent:

“Cholent, a ray of light immortal

Cholent, daughter of Elysium!”.

(p. 28)

Looking beyond the line’s parody of Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy, Mendes-Flohr directs our attention to the evocative power traditional food exerts on one’s cultural identification. Though far from unique to Judaism, this particular example from the quill of one of the most famous Jewish converts to Christianity, Heine’s ode stands for the resistance of certain elements of cultural memory to the vicissitudes of modernity, especially in the shadow of secularization.

Less whimsical and more substantive in his argument, Mendes-Flohr posits the trope of the “Jewish Bookcase,” a term connoting a repository of works whose physical presence in one’s library reflects one’s cultural, intellectual and spiritual choices as a modern Jew. In Israeli public discourse, the term has come to symbolize traditional Judaism as represented by its literary corpus,11 and a model for a revised, current version amenable to secular, pluralistic sensibilities.12 The term is a variation on the title of a poem by Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934): “Before the Bookcase” (Lifney Aron Ha-Sefarim). The poem laments the decline of traditional Jewish learning, which had thrived in study halls known as batei midrash. The shelves laden with books of religious lore, forsaken by the cohorts of young men who had up and left in search of new pursuits in the world beyond their enclosed communities, represent to the poem’s speaking subject the demise of a study culture that served as a homeland in exile:

And once more my hand turns your parchment pages

And my eye fumbles, weary, between the lines

Seeking silence amongst the prickly script

Attempting to grasp there the traces of my soul

And find the path of its nascent throbs

At its place of birth and death.

(Bialik 2022)

Mendes-Flohr does not mention Bialik. Yet the figures invoked in this context in the book—Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig—embody two polar reactions to the pressing challenge that haunted the Hebrew poet, of forming a personal canon that reflects one’s Jewishness and modern disjunctions.13 Benjamin, today an emblem of Weimar intellectual life, had scant knowledge of Jewish learning and a great passion for mystical thought, mediated to him by close friend and Kabbalah scholar extraordinaire Gershom Scholem.14 Mendes-Flohr reads Benjamin’s essay, “Unpacking my Library” (Benjamin 2007) as conjuring up “[…] a distinctive bibliophilic and intellectual landscape, marking the by-ways of his spiritual biography” (CD, p. 36). This landscape cannot be described as Jewish in any conventional sense, other than by reflecting the cultural memory of an acculturated Jew. However, it most emphatically represents the secular mindset of modern Jews from the time of Baruch Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677) onwards, whose interest shifted away from establishing epistemic and hermeneutical stability, and over to a mindset seeking to “[…] question, refine and if deemed necessary, revise the fundamental premises on which truth and meaning are determined” (p. 41).

Franz Rosenzweig became deeply committed to study and reflection on the traditional literary corpus of Jewish thought, yet remained wary of the significance of secular skepsis for the renewal and continuity of Jewish learning. Mendes-Flohr’s transition from Benjamin to Rosenzweig links the phenomenon of a regenerated repository of intellectual-spiritual canon, with the next phenomenon he identifies as a constitutive element of Jewish identity: learning.

Rosenzweig’s Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (Free House of Jewish Study) encapsulates for Mendes-Flohr an ideal modern institution that is pluralistic, welcoming of secular skepsis and epistemological instability. Such an institution is hence capable of resuscitating the existential attachment to study, which Bialik had declared dead less than ten years before Rosenzweig’s Lehrhaus opened its doors in Frankfurt am Main.15 The Lehrhaus’s history—short in span, long in legacy—should be viewed as functioning proleptically to support an argument for “sacred attunement”: the transformation of the traditional study method of Jewish texts—Talmud Torah—into “a hermeneutic practice of meditative reflection” (p. 70). The premodern institution of Jewish learning as a way of life, transformed by Rosenzweig’s openness to skepsis and intercultural, interfaith inspiration, provides a possible palliative to the ethical, cultural and spiritual dangers of the post-traditional present: parochial traditionalism (p. 72), dissolving identities (pp. 71–72), or Zionist−Israeli indifference to the plight of non-Jewish residents and citizens (pp. 73–74).

The center of gravity of modern Jewish identity that emerges comprises of two phenomena linked to religious knowledge: canonization and learning. In their post-traditional incarnations, these phenomena are shaped by re-evaluating critique and the rejection of barriers. However, their bond to the intellectual−spiritual legacy of tradition is formative: it emerges as the font of historical continuity of Jewish identity, enabling the phenomena to straddle the pre-modern, traditional heritage and the multiplicity of the modern age.

4. Between Borders and Discontent

As already indicated, the two concluding chapters of Cultural Disjunctions address Mendes-Flohr’s second goal: identifying a Jewish creed in whose light Jewish identity should be refined, and the ethical impact of life choices should be reflected upon. Each chapter treats one element, respectively, under the headings of “boundaries” and “discontent.”16 Crucially for our proleptic interpretation of the book, Mendes-Flohr traces the roots of both elements to Judaism’s sacred canon: the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature. The texts’ persistence throughout history does not translate here into seamless continuity. As Mendes-Flohr observes in another context in the book, the dynamic transformations that borders and discontent have undergone may be characterized as rhizomatic. Borrowed from biology, the term was introduced to intellectual discourse in Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 2005). The conceptualization of their book as a rhizome, views it as “[…] a reflection on the manner in which it operates—not according to a linear, arch-teleological structure, with chapters written in succession, but as a juxtaposition of plateaus, which communicate with one another simultaneously and in a potentially infinite number of ways” (de Bastegui 2018, p. 12).

Counterintuitively to a rhizomatic approach, Mendes-Flohr’s exposition of the presence of borders in Jewish thought is chronological: beginning with rabbinic literature, moving on to the Middle Ages, European Enlightenment and the ensuing Jewish Haskalah, the Holocaust, and ending with the State of Israel (CD, pp. 80–87). Yet, it is underlain by a rhizomatic network of simultaneous interaction between the historical moments that comprise this purportedly continuous chronology. A more detailed elaboration on the operation of borders within this rhizomatic history may be found in the work of Israeli sociologist Zali Gurevitch. In his monograph On Israeli and Jewish Space (Gurevitch 2007), borders are subsumed under what we may describe more broadly as “Jewish spatial consciousness”. The Mishnaic appellation for God—Ha-Makkom—which literally means “the place”, creates a pun in the book’s Hebrew title: Al Ha-Makkom. This brief phrase may mean “about the notion of place”, but also “on site”, “on the spot”, as well as “about Ha-Makkom”. Mendes-Flohr describes the meaning of the appellation as “meta-spatial; God is above all tellurian, worldly space, for God encompasses all space” (CD, p. 80). This conception, an outcome of the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 CE, gave rise, according to Gurevitch, to a collective Jewish syndrome of foreignness in the homeland (Gurevitch 2007, p. 27), which yielded an irreducible duality in Jews’ relation to place—as site and as God—and homeland—as country of origin and as symbol: “The site [The Land of Israel] is charged with the meaning of being The Place. It is impossible to arrive at it as if it were a virginal land like Australia or Birobidzhan. The Land of Israel had been deflowered, not only by history and by other peoples, but by a book” (Gurevitch 2007, p. 28). Gurevitch is referring here to the Hebrew Bible, but the irreducibility of The Land as a symbol was compounded by numerous discourses in rabbinic and post-rabbinic literature. Interestingly, On Israeli and Jewish Place includes an extended reflection on a spatio-theological concept other than Ha-Makkom: Am-Olam. Of biblical origin,17 the phrase assumed the function of expressing Jews’ abiding relationship with their God, resulting in the paradoxical meaning in Hebrew of “the eternal people.” The paradox arises from the use of the known world—Olam—to denote time, or supra-temporal existence, and so, Am Olam appears, for example, in the Hebrew translation of Simon Dubnow’s monumental ten-volume History of the Jewish People (Divrey Yemei Am Olam; i.e., The Annals of the Eternal People):18 “In a national context, Am Olam plays with both meanings, of being an eternal people and of simultaneously being a people that exists in the world, but does not necessarily force itself upon a single little place, such as the Land of Israel” (Gurevitch 2007, p. 92). Once more, we encounter the irreducibility of place to either site or symbol, which has coagulated into an irresolvable tension between the two, a tension that Jews in general and Israeli Jews in particular must bear: “’The Land of Israel’ aligns together two forms of Jewish life—the exilic, which had been disconnected from the land and became a book-based Judaism, and the local and ancient, which had vanished from the face of the earth—but the Hebrew Bible testifies to its existence, as do remnants protruding from the ground.” This duality framed the experience of settling in Israel as part of the Zionist project: “The pioneer coming to the Land of Israel felt as if returning to a country that is his, whereas in actual fact he came to a foreign place. The pioneer experience is infused with this duality of an ancient, deflowered land and of a new, virginal land” (Gurevitch 2007, p. 41).

An important chapter in the history of German−Jewish thought defined by a similar irreducible duality is the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement. This movement marked Jews’ departure from the intellectual ghettoization of traditional community life, and their entry to the academic arena as scholars of their own religion’s history. Though absent from Mendes-Flohr’s discussion of borders in Cultural Disjunctions, this period may be said to provide a proleptic account of the modern Jewish predicament as framed by borders. Scholars such as Leopold Zunz (1794–1886), Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907), Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891) and Abraham Geiger (1810–1874) were admitted to university as students in the wake of Emancipation in Germany, but were denied the prospect of receiving academic appointments unless they converted to Christianity. The enormous tension this professional impasse created was intensified further by intra-Jewish objections to the introduction of scientific (and hence secular) research methods to the study of sacred Jewish lore. In his study of the movement, Mendes-Flohr mentions influential rabbi and scholar, Samson Rafael Hirsch, who pointed out the radical “gap—a radical cognitive disjunction—between the historians’ knowledge and that of the believing Jew of tradition” (Mendes-Flohr 2019, p. 165). This conflict, at once internal and external, may be said to accompany Jewish modernity from then onwards, and perhaps also anticipate the challenges arising from the shifting borders—geographical and symbolic—of Jewish existence. The admission of Jews to academic institutions, and their intellectual segregation in non-academic rabbinic seminaries and research communities, is part of what Mendes-Flohr describes as, “the tragic betrayal of Europe to realize the ideals of the Enlightenment and the attendant promise to provide the Jews with a dignified and inviolable place within the modern social and political order” (CD, p. 85). The upshot of this European failure, he continues, supported the founding of the State of Israel, “in seeking to redress the failure of post-Enlightenment exile of the Arab population of Palestine” (p. 85).

In this regard as well, acrimonious reception of Wissenschaft des Judentums by the rabbinic establishment in the nineteenth century may be seen as anticipatory enactment of current intra-Jewish disputes on Israel’s ethical responsibility toward Palestinians. Mendes-Flohr is emphatic: “To ignore this cry [of displaced Palestinians] is a blasphemous betrayal of the foundational principle of Judaism […]” (p. 85). How could the dilemmas of Jewish historians in mid-nineteenth century Germany be compared with the dilemmas of newly-forged Jewish sovereigns, facing a population that is either hostile or disapproving in mid-twentieth century Israel? Rachel Livneh-Freudental characterizes the bind in which Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars found themselves as follows: “Jews must therefore represent Judaism in order to maintain its particularism, but at the very same time their Jewishness must not curb their social integration” (Livneh-Freudenthal 2018, p. 195). That is, under the external tension in the social-intellectual matrix of post-Emancipation Germany, Jewish identity was at once a calling and an obstacle. Acculturated Jewish intellectuals strove to reinstate and renew Jewish uniqueness in the context of modern society, and this very self-empowering act led to an inevitable clash with greater German society, which expected full and utter immersion in the fabric of Christian civil society.19

In pre-state Palestine through Israel’s War of Independence, native-born Jews, the “sabras,” faced the opposite predicament: the abovementioned ambivalence toward localization, or national domestication, projected onto Jewish responses to the indigenous Arab population: “Envy and admiration alongside contest and grudge. The sabras, who were supposed to symbolize full confidence in their local roots, were exposed as lacking in confidence. The Jewish notion of Place [Ha-Makkom] pushes Zionists to seek Palestinians’ attention and to compete with them, and this rivalry pushes them back to their Jewish identity” (Gurevitch 2007, p. 52). Gurevitch sees this ambivalence as directly related to the ascendancy of a military approach to the resolution of territorial disputes (the epitome of the Zionist dilemma of place), which culminated in the conquest of the land in 1948 (p. 53).

Hence, what we may characterize as “beyond the border” existence defined the pioneering work of scholars such as Zunz, Geiger and Graetz, as well as participation in the Zionist project in the Land of Israel—before and after the founding of the state. Despite invariably different circumstances, the agents in both arenas deliberately crossed borders—from ghetto to civil society, from home country to national homeland—and saw their hopes dashed. The practical fulfillment of the transgressive aspirations left much to be desired, and at the same time did not lead to the collapse of the edifice in whose name the agents set out on their new venture.

At the time of birth and childhood of the sabras who would go to the battlefields in 1948, in Heppenheim, Germany, Buber wrote a study in biblical history that argues for deep historical links between the People of Israel and the nomadic tribes of the Arab peninsula. Kingship of God20 (Königtum Gottes) marked Buber’s first attempt to publish historical−philological research, and marshalled conventional historical research methodologies and the scientific literature of the day in order to explore a charged thesis—theologically and politically. According to Buber’s thesis, Jewish messianic anticipation is grounded in faith in God’s worldly presence in the political life of ancient Israel, which presence was manifested by God’s kingship in a certain period in early Israelite national history. Buber draws parallels between the biblical accounts on the social and political character of ancient Israel and pre-Islamic Arab tribes in chapters 3–5 and 8. His thesis projects neither awe nor contempt toward the indigenous inhabitants of the deserts of the Middle East, to whom he refers mainly as Bedouins. Instead, they are presented as the most useful and reliable historical relic for constructing a lifelike picture of the social−political reality in which the Israelites forged their way into Canaan, and their erratic progression toward becoming a polity:

The question why a society [Verband] of half-nomadic tribes that wandered out of Egypt did not elevate a human leader [Führer] to be king [Melekh], has its answer in their Bedouin quality [Beduinentum] […] The stiff-necked nation submitted itself to kingly rule [Königsbund] under the leadership of a godly redeemer [göttlicher Befreiers] who had crushed the poles of their yoke and had led them [to freedom] upright”.

(Buber 2014, p. 176)

The matter-of-fact association of a “Bedouin quality” with the Sons of Israel fleeing Egypt, not as a passing comment but as part of an extensive historical thesis, is quite remarkable. Kingship of God was written during the Nazi Party’s rise to power, and published in 1932, one year before its overtaking of the German republic was completed. That is, Buber was writing at a time when German Jews were facing an unprecedented political threat in Europe, and Jews in Palestine were still trying to overcome a surge of violent clashes that broke out in 1929. Buber appears to have used in this case the scientific temperance of source analysis to exert ethical judgment inspired by the biblical faith in a just, upright God, commonly referred to as “the Holy One Blessed be He” (CD, pp. 98–99). Indeed, Buber had left a clear indication that he wrote this study with acute awareness of this supratemporal link between the subject of study on the one hand, and the present and future on the other hand. The first edition’s book jacket states that it is to be the first of three volumes dedicated to the study of messianic faith in Israel.21 After presenting the project plan and the structure of its first installment, Buber asserts:

The method of the work is historical, but its purpose is supra-historical [übergeschichtlich]. In this first volume the realistic, genuine unconditioned theocracy—not priestly rule but the paradoxical venture of a society under the unmediated power [botmäßigen Gemeinschaft] of God alone—is presented in its religious and political essence.

(Buber 1932, cover)

A rationale for framing the study with the tension between historical and suprahistorical purposes appears in the book’s foreword:

Since the question of Jewish messianic adaptation of a genuine manifestation [Ausdruck] of God’s kingship in a manner commensurate with worldly life does not only pertain to historical memory, but to the eternal potential of God’s presence in political life, it ceases to be a mere religious surface observed; it intervenes with the political existence of peoplehood. It also extracts the question from the sphere of religious history and places it in the sphere of history.

(Buber 2014, p. 95)

Buber’s intention was commonly understood as using biblical history to camouflage a commentary on the predicament of German Jewry under Nazism (Mendes-Flohr 1991, p. 34). Yet, there is no patent reason to limit the relevance of Buber’s study of divine rule to the historical moment of its composition. Its two successive editions (1936, 1955) and Hebrew translation (1965) attest to Buber’s conviction that his thesis exerts an abiding pertinence.22 The closing argument of the sixth and final chapter of Cultural Disjunctions may help draw Kingship of God from its specific (and hence inert) historical moment of composition, to be read as an exercise in proleptic historiography as well. “Biblical faith”, Mendes-Flohr asserts, “induces a sacred discontent as an ontological mistrust of all that is of human making […] Beholden to God as the transcendent ground of life, we resist the myopic pull of human hubris, individual and collective” (CD, p. 102).

Buber’s study culminates in an elaborate account of the fulfillment of theocracy, i.e., divine kingship in the Hebrew Bible, which the book’s eighth chapter presents at its most potent when God casts Himself in the role of commander in chief of the Israelite army: “JAHWE’s war is the war of the Melekh who had fulfilled his promise.” The era of transition from Saul’s reign to David’s kingship, says Buber, marked the end of biblical theocracy (Buber 2014, p. 182). Buber conducts a long comparison between rule by virtue of charisma (which the Bedouins exemplify) to rule by lineage, in support of the argument for God’s withdrawal from direct political intervention. In his view, King David’s institution of dynastic rule marked the arrival of human domination in the history of Israel, and the farewell to God’s unmediated presence in its midst.

This historical observation, made on the basis of textual analysis, appears in the context of a scholarly discussion of the biblical narrative of God’s evolving relationship with the People of Israel. Yet, the watershed moment it identifies has implications far exceeding either the biblical setting or scientific discourse. Under Buber’s reading, the end of theocracy took place when Israelite sovereignty was approaching its peak during the Davidic dynasty; in other words, divine rule over the political reality of the People of Israel came to an end long before Babylonian exile, or any other catastrophic event. Hence, any claims to influence of divine providence in later biblical history, or any moment in Jewish history, Buber would argue, have no prooftext to rely on.

The proleptic potential of this conclusion to rhetorical and substantive references to divine involvement in military actions (or other forms of conflict) could not be overstated. Any historical event, from the decimation of Jewish communities during the Crusades to the purchase of tracts of land in pre-state Palestine, Buber would argue, has no recourse to God’s endorsement of the human decisions made in His name.

That biblical theocracy continues to be relevant in twenty-first century Israel may be gleaned from the following anecdote about the ceremony in which new recruits to the Israel Defense Forces pledge allegiance, which includes the granting of a special issue Hebrew Bible embossed with the IDF emblem. This gesture may be interpreted in a number of ways, particularly in light of the recently added practice of granting a copy of the New Testament or Quran to Christian and Muslim soldiers, respectively. Another element in the ceremony, customary but not mandatory, evinces more emphatically the contemporary relevance of the biblical God’s presence on the battlefield: a reading by a military rabbi of a passage from Joshua 1:1–9, in which God advises Joshua on things to come in the wake of Moses’ death. The verses include the following promises: “Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I shall give you […] For I have commanded you to be fierce and bold, do not tremble or fear, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go” (Joshua 1:3, 9).23 The combination of territorial acquisition through divine pledge and promise of physical protection is cited from a biblical prooftext that belongs to the theocratic period according to Buber’s thesis; but the contemporary context of prooftext recitation indicates that the ceremony proceedings are aimed, in some sense, to reinstate an historical reality whose demise had been witnessed by ancient Israel. Such a welcome for impressionable young women and men to military service provides a glimpse of the wide gamut of possible outcomes of the canonization processes and learning cultures that Mendes-Flohr’s figures of the Jewish Bookcase and Sacred Attunement engender. It is also the point where historical research and ethical critique meet.

In contemporary Israel, the Hebrew Bible is present not only in matters of war, but also in matters of law. The East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, a microcosm of the Israeli−Palestinian conflict past and present, has prompted Mendes-Flohr to publish an opinion piece in which he crosses the border from scholarship to activism. Its pretext is a rancorous dispute between the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah facing eviction from properties owned by Jewish settlers, who leverage legal loopholes and state-backed bias to systematically purchase real estate in the neighborhood. Its content is a learned overview of the dissonance between commentaries by Jewish public intellectuals from Buber’s milieu—Ahad Ha’am (1856–1927) and Robert Weltsch (1891–1982)—and founder of the Revisionist Movement, Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940). If Cultural Disjunctions stretches the limits of historical methodology by dissolving the categorical distinctions between space and time, subject and object, as well as between historical eras, “Cri de Coeur” breaks those limits by offering commentary on current affairs. Nonetheless, the picture Mendes-Flohr paints of the bleeding present makes extensive use of political commentaries and forecasts made approximately a century ago: from Ahad Ha’am’s impressions after visiting Palestine, to Jabotinsky’s evaluation of nascent Arab nationalism, and Weltch’s premonition of an ethical and human catastrophe forthcoming from Jewish−Arab relations. The legal, political and civil mechanisms at play in Sheikh Jarrah engineer a reality that appears to be incontrovertible, whereas the history of the conflict and especially its intellectual history highlight the many stops along the way on which a shift of course may have led the conflict to unfold differently. However, as said, this discussion is beyond the pale of academic scholarship.

5. Conclusions

As I have tried to demonstrate, the striving for living a life of Spirit by seeking I−Thou dialogue permeates the proleptic approach to intellectual historiography in Cultural Disjunctions. Instead of highlighting linkages between discrete details, it is the sum total of scholarly gestures, unconventional associations and most of all, engagement with the legacy and ideas of German−Jewish thinkers as partners to a conversation, that infuses Cultural Disjunctions with the quality of second-person dialogue. While destabilized methodologically, the proleptic approach opens up new avenues of creativity that may lead to new insights: the reassurance Walter Benjamin drew from his personal bibliophilic landscape contrasting with the foreignness syndrome of Zionists in the Land of Israel; the transgressive ideology of Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars (e.g., Zunz, Graetz, Geiger) as a means for mending the rift that Emancipation had torn open in traditional Jewish identity; or a gross (and inadvertent) misreading of Buber’s theocratic thesis as enacting the rite of passage of young Israelis upon joining the IDF. Such creativity, which Cultural Disjunctions inspires, honors and continues the legacy of intellectuals such as Ahad Ha’am, Weltsch, poets like Celan, and above all Buber, by testing the boundaries of research and questioning anew the scholarly subject matter, without fearing the occasional lapse.

“Cri de Coeur” is built around an article of Buber’s professing that Israel’s prophetic heritage comes in tow with a moral responsibility to continue upholding concern for the well-being of all humans. Toward the conclusion of Cultural Disjunctions, Mendes-Flohr summarizes the character of this heritage as follows:

The prophet’s discontent is not personal but social and political. It expresses a passionate concern for his society’s moral and religious integrity—which are, in fact, homologous and thus one. His cause is justice and compassion; his concern is for the Other. But as an emblem of true piety, the prophet does not stand apart from ordinary men and women.

(CD, p. 97)

It is with the same compassion that Mendes-Flohr approaches the legacy of German−Jewish thought, in the hope of finding ever-renewed foresight and insights about the past, the present and the future.