The Marrano Phenomenon Jewish ‘Hidden Tradition’ and Modernity
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Marrano Phenomenon Jewish ‘Hidden Tradition’ and Modernity Edited by Agata Bielik-Robson Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Religions www.mdpi.com/journal/religions The Marrano Phenomenon The Marrano Phenomenon Jewish ‘Hidden Tradition’ and Modernity Special Issue Editor Agata Bielik-Robson MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade Special Issue Editor Agata Bielik-Robson The University of Nottingham UK Editorial Office MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel, Switzerland This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Religions (ISSN 2077-1444) from 2018 to 2019 (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special issues/marrano) For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: LastName, A.A.; LastName, B.B.; LastName, C.C. Article Title. Journal Name Year, Article Number, Page Range. ISBN 978-3-03897-904-3 (Pbk) ISBN 978-3-03897-905-0 (PDF) This special issue of Religions has been supported by the NCN Opus 13 Grant: /The Marrano Phenomenon: The Jewish ‘Hidden Tradition’ and Modernity/, registered in the OSF system as 2017/25/B/HS2/02901. c 2019 by the authors. Articles in this book are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book as a whole is distributed by MDPI under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. Contents About the Special Issue Editor ...................................... vii Preface to ”The Marrano Phenomenon” ................................ ix Daniel H. Weiss Marranism as Judaism as Universalism: Reconsidering Spinoza Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 168, doi:10.3390/rel10030168 ................... 1 William Large Atheism of the Word: Narrated Speech and the Origin of Language in Cohen, Rosenzweig and Levinas Reprinted from: Religions 2018, 9, 404, doi:10.3390/rel9120404 .................... 17 Adam Lipszyc The Seduction of the Name: Universal Marranism and the Secret of Being-in-Language Reprinted from: Religions 2018, 9, 359, doi:10.3390/rel9110359 .................... 29 Francisco Naishtat Benjamin’s Profane Uses of Theology: The Invisible Organon Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 93, doi:10.3390/rel10020093 .................... 37 Przemyslaw Tacik Ernst Bloch as a Non-Simultaneous Jewish Marxist Reprinted from: Religions 2018, 9, 346, doi:10.3390/rel9110346 .................... 53 Jakub G´orski Concerning Some Marrano Threads in The Aesthetic Theory of Theodor W. Adorno Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 173, doi:10.3390/rel10030173 ................... 73 Agata Bielik-Robson The Marrano God: Abstraction, Messianicity, and Retreat in Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge” Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 22, doi:10.3390/rel10010022 .................... 94 Rafael Zawisza Thank God We Are Creatures: Hannah Arendt’s Cryptotheology Reprinted from: Religions 2018, 9, 371, doi:10.3390/rel9110371 ....................117 Emilie Kutash Jacques Derrida: The Double Liminality of a Philosophical Marrano Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 68, doi:10.3390/rel10020068 ....................141 Piotr Sawczynski ´ Giorgio Agamben—A Modern Sabbatian? Marranic Messianism and the Problem of Law Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 24, doi:10.3390/rel10010024 ....................153 Aleksandr Gaisin Solovyov’s Metaphysics between Gnosis and Theurgy Reprinted from: Religions 2018, 9, 354, doi:10.3390/rel9110354 ....................164 Simon Crook A Ruby and Triangled Sign upon the Forehead of Taurus: Modalities of Revelation in Megalithic Archaeoastronomy and James Joyce’s Novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake Reprinted from: Religions 2018, 9, 375, doi:10.3390/rel9110375 ....................174 v Elad Lapidot Invisible Concealment of Invisibility Crypto-Judaism as a Theological Paradigm of Racial Anti-Semitism Reprinted from: Religions 2018, 9, 339, doi:10.3390/rel9110339 ....................192 vi About the Special Issue Editor Agata Bielik-Robson is a Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham and a Professor of Philosophy at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She has published articles in Polish, English, German, French, and Russian on philosophical aspects of psychoanalysis, romantic subjectivity, and the philosophy of religion (especially Judaism and its crossings with modern philosophical thought). Her publications have been included in the following books: The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (in English, Northwestern University Press, May 2011); Judaism in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Influence (coedited with Adam Lipszyc, Routledge 2014); Philosophical Marranos: Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity (Routledge 2014); and Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (Bloomsbury 2019). vii Preface to “The Marrano Phenomenon” What we call here the ‘Marrano phenomenon’ is still a relatively unexplored fact of modern Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity, which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution, but nevertheless exerts significant influence on modern humanities: philosophy, literature, and art. Our aim, however, is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), i.e., the mostly Spanish and Portuguese Jews of the 15th and 16th century, who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism ‘undercover’; such an approach already exists and has been developed within the field of historical research (e.g., Roth 2001; Yerushalmi, 1981). We rather want to apply the ‘Marrano metaphor’ to explore the fruitful area of mixture and crossover which allowed modern thinkers, writers, and artists of Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication—without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness, which they subsequently developed as a ‘hidden tradition’. The ‘Marrano metaphor’ was used by Hannah Arendt for the first time, who, in her essay “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition”, implicitly compared the great European thinkers and writers of Jewish origin to the Marranos who were permitted to enter the realm of universality only on the condition of concealing their particular ‘bias’: When it comes to claiming its own in the field of European arts and letters, the attitude of the Jewish people may best be described as one of reckless magnanimity. With a grand gesture and without a murmur of protest it has calmly allowed the credit for its great writers and artists to go to other peoples, itself receiving in turn the doubtful privilege of being acclaimed father of every notorious swindler and mountebank. True enough, there has been a tendency in recent years to compile long lists of European worthies who might conceivably claim Jewish descent, but such lists are more in the nature of mass graves for the forgotten than of enduring monuments to the remembered and cherished. Useful as they may be for purposes of propaganda (offensive as well as defensive), they have not succeeded in reclaiming for the Jews any single writer of note unless he happened to have written specifically in Hebrew or Yiddish. Those who really did most for the spiritual dignity of their people, who were great enough to transcend the bounds of nationality and to weave the strands of their Jewish genius into the general texture of European life, have been given short shrift and perfunctory recognition [...]. These great figures have been left perforce to the tender mercies of assimilationist propagandists [...]. No one fares worse from this process than those bold spirits who tried to make of the emancipation of the Jews that which it really should have been – an admission of Jews as Jews to the ranks of humanity, rather than a permit to ape the gentiles or an opportunity to play a parvenu. (Arendt 2007, p. 275; my emphasis) Arendt depicts the ‘Marrano’ condition of the ‘Jewish genius’ forced to play the role of a parvenu in mostly negative terms: its ‘reckless magnanimity’, which gives generously from the sources of Judaic tradition without expecting any recognition in return, meets nothing but doubt, scorn, and suspicion. In result, all that is ‘worthy’ becomes immediately assimilated by the host tradition, which sees itself as the only universal one—and all that is ‘doubtful’ falls back on the deficiencies of Jewish particularism. The ix ‘Marrano’ emancipation does not allow an admission of ‘Jews as Jews’; it only allows for a clandestine game of imitation, which sometimes leaves a secret trace—or signature—to be readable only by those in the same predicament. Yet, although Arendt’s diagnosis is bitterly true, it also omits a chance to look at the ‘Marrano phenomenon’ in a more affirmative way: not just as the condition imposed ‘perforce’ by the outsiders, but also as a new model of internally assumed subidentity which indeed “transcends the bounds of nationality and weaves the strands of the Jewish genius into the general texture of European life”. If Arendt rightly complains that so far, all the ‘lists of worthies’, enumerating the instances of the ‘Jewish genius’, managed to reclaim for Jewishness only those who “happened to have written specifically in Hebrew or Yiddish”, our project aims to meet this complaint. Thanks to the ‘Marrano’ methodology of reading the texts of culture as performing