From Historiography to Theography: Reflections on the Role of Theological Aesthetics in The Female Face of God in Auschwitz

Abstract

This article gives the author’s response to the four preceding essays. It reflects on how, six years after its publication, the book’s contribution might be categorised not only as a work of Jewish feminist theology, but also as a form of Jewish aesthetic theology. That is, without furthering a cultural aestheticisation of the Holocaust whose romanticism threatens to sever the events from their own historicity, the book should be read as a theology of visual revelation where survivor testimony to the endurance of women’s relationships in Auschwitz is also situated within the theodrama of redemption history as narrated by traditional and modern Jewish accounts of God’s appearance in history.