The Myth of the Jew: Negating the Negation

Abstract

The Myth of the Jew:Negating the Negation Nitzan Lebovic (bio) Keywords Myth, Jewish thought, Paul Hanebrink, Elad Lapidot, Ole Jakob Løland Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. Elad Lapidot, Jews out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020. Ole Jakob Løland, Pauline Ugliness: Jacob Taubes and the Turn to Paul. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. To what degree is jewish studies still engaging with the myth of the Jew? A popular view identifies Jewish monotheism with a consistent opposition to mythological cyclicality and a pantheistic view of nature. In contrast, academic research demonstrated how limited this view is, and how important mythological themes have been to Jewish scripture and commentary.1 Take, for example, the impact of mythological images of nefilim—fallen beings, but also angels or giants—most clearly visible at times of crisis and "political judgments against royal power."2 Three recent books—in political history, critical thought, and political theology—exemplify how vibrant but problematic myth-making still is for our understanding of Jewish culture. Before turning to these recent books, however, it is worth briefly revisiting the history of the problematic relationship between Jews and their myths. If in premodern times Jews were represented in popular imagery as angels and giants, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the mythic [End Page 327] representation of Jews turned antisemitic and hypernationalist. As a result, after 1945 philosophers and historians in the West adopted a skeptical view of myths and prophetic tropes. The German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer and the Polish-born Israeli historian Jacob Talmon admired myth as a literary and artistic form, but detested its role in modern politics; myth, they felt, had been at the core of the new language of violence and antisemitism that arose with radical nationalism and racism. "Perhaps the most important and the most alarming feature in this development of modern political thought," Cassirer, then a refugee in the United States, wrote in 1946, "is the appearance of a new power: the power of mythical thought."3 Anchored in the ancient language of death and revival, its political form "is nothing but the dark shadow cast by language on the world of human thought."4 A decade later, Talmon identified a "collective state of permanent excitement" that had turned nineteenth-century national mythic language into twentieth-century "political messianism" and "totalitarian democracy" (1956). For Talmon, as for the political thinker Hannah Arendt, whose Origins of Totalitarianism. (1951, 1954) came out shortly before Talmon's first book, capitalism and fascism had certain characteristics in common, such as the popularity of myth among masters of mass media.5 In the following decades, Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Hans Blumenberg, among others, analyzed myth both as a form and as an agent of historical change. Considering it as a multivalent phenomenon was necessary to capture its power as a cultural force and a strange political beast. Instead of biblical catastrophes or Homer's creatures and heroes, the modern nation gave birth to a cult of self-aggrandizing "authoritarian personalities" and an unparalleled play of propaganda that fueled new myths. The post-1945 analysis of myth focused on the relationship between politics and language. Historians and theoreticians showed that the new evocation of power relied on a process of "emptying out" of meaning. For example, Viktor Klemperer's Lingua tertii imperii (Language of the Third Reich, 1947), unpacked the Nazi "emptying out of language" and the injection into it of mythic and collective "excitement." In contrast to Cassirer's historical overview, Klemperer's linguistic analysis focused on recent examples such as Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century or Josef Goebbels's articles in the Nazi dailies. The emptying out of language was [End Page 328] needed in order to dehumanize the Jew and shape the image of the Hitlerian Übermensch. A decade after Klemperer, Cassirer, and Talmon, Roland Barthes's Mythologies (1957) interpreted myth from the perspective of semiology—the study of symbols and signs—which he contrasted to the power of poetics. While avoiding a direct confrontation with the fascist use of myth...