Israelijew Jewisraeli: Yoram Kaniuk’s Adam Resurrected and the Problem of the Human

Netta Van Vliet

doi:10.3390/rel11040157

Abstract

This article considers the political and philosophical genealogies of the category “Israeli Jew” in terms of Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk’s Adam Resurrected, which I situate within the wider context of contemporary Israel. Israel is defined by some as a colonial and occupying state and by others as a liberal democracy founded on narratives of modern nationalism, but also on the Abrahamic narrative of 2000 years of Jewish exile. The category “Israeli Jew” thus brings together the figure of the diasporic Jew as not fully sovereign with Zionism’s figure of the “New Jew,” based on European modernity’s ideal of a sovereign, autonomous, citizen subject. I show how, by bringing these figures together, rather than replacing one with the other, the category “Israeli Jew” brings together the specificity of the different genealogies that these terms carry. In this regard, I argue, Israel can be understood as an instantiation of the historical legacy of the philosophical binary between the Athenian and the Hebraic, which, as Miriam Leonard, Jacques Derrida, and others have pointed out, informs the long durée of Western political philosophy.

Highlights

German Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss, in the preface to the English translation of his Spinoza’sCritique of Religion, wrote: The establishment of the state of Israel is the most profound modification of the Galut [theDiaspora, or Exile] . . . , but it is not the end of the Galut: in the religious sense, and perhaps in the religious sense, the state of Israel is a part of the Galut
While Strauss and his contemporaries remarked on Zionism and Israel in terms of the challenges that Jewish difference posed for the political frameworks of European liberalism, present-day debates about Israel rarely address the question of Jewish difference
Israel should fall in line with the ideals of European liberal democracy; defenders insist that Israel already does (Pappe 2014; Shafir and Peled 2002; Yakobson and Rubinstein 2010; Yiftachel 2006)

Summary

Introduction

German Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss, in the preface to the English translation of his Spinoza’s. In a significant departure from the two lines of analysis that dominate the literature about Israel, this article argues neither for an understanding of Israel as the latest form of settler-colonialism, nor for an understanding of Israel as a European liberal democracy that is the latest stage of Jewish presence in the region Rather, it shows how an analysis of the conjunction “Israeli Jew” and its political and Religions 2020, 11, 157; doi:10.3390/rel11040157 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions. By posing a question about how to understand sexual difference, a consideration of Israeli Jewish sovereignty reanimates the “Jewish Question” and—beyond Israel—calls into question notions of the liberal, universal sovereign subject Such an analysis, I suggest, has profound implications for how we understand the consequences of European humanism’s concept of the human, as well as the politics through which Europe and its colonial legacies took shape. The rest of this essay is dedicated to explaining what I mean in making this claim

Israeli Jew

Israelijew Jewisraeli

Conclusion