States of Exile

I am always delighted to find a new (invariably old) Jew after my own heart. And so, Benjamin De Casseres, who also shares my name. From an article in Tablet : Benjamin De Casseres was born April 3, 1873, in Philadelphia, to a Jewish family of Sephardic descent. And so, an outsider: This man so vocal about his Manhattan credentials was born out of town, in the sixth borough; not Ashkenazi like the majority of American Jewry, he was a nonimmigrant from comparatively exotic stock. The family name derives from Cáceres, the ancestral capital of the same-named Spanish province, and De Casseres himself liked to speculate that he was related to a hero of his, Spinoza: one Samuel De Casseres married Spinoza’s youngest sister, Miriam, became a rabbi and scribe, and offered the funeral eulogy for his teacher, and Spinoza’s excommunicator, Rabbi Saul Levi Mortera of Amsterdam. An outsider as a Jew and an outsider to the Jews: my favourite kind. Physically, De Casseres writes of himself: “I am str...

There is a concept of deity worth entertaining, the holy storm-God Jehovah, wreathed not in the holiness of moral goodness or of aesthetic beauty, but in a dreadful uncanniness. Believe in him or not, at least he would be a worthwhile character, president of an order that is neither benign nor moral, an order adequately represented in religion only by the God beyond good and evil that Nietzsche discerns in parts of the Old Testament. - Stephen N. Williams, How Nietzsche Found Jesus Justice is divine only insofar as it makes no human sense. Christ is God bowdlerized. YHWH's lost commandment: épater la bourgeoisie .

[Ernst] Toller's grandfather studied the Talmud, but Toller became a leader of the Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919. His flight from Judaism led him first to ultranationalism and superpatriotism, then to socialism and cosmopolitanism, and finally to his suicide on 22 May 1939. - Jacob Golomb, "Nietzsche and the Marginal Jews"

A Montaigne, a Proust, a Bergson have managed to root firmly in our rich and complex literature what may be called the Franco-Semitic element. - Thibaudet The new "Franco-Semitic element" replaces literary fire with burning cars. But then, with Dreyfus and Vichy as rewards for assimilation, can one blame the Arab for standing apart?

Life is a railway station of partings and meetings. We are constant travellers, Holding in our hands our inseparable baggage, A little suitcase Of struggles, onslaughts and memories. - Fatos Arapi

God endowed Adam with the intuition to take two stones - named Darkness and Shadow of Death - rub them against each other, and so discover fire. - Joseph H. Hertz Man can build his greatness, without religion, on the nothingness that crushes him. - André Malraux

The biggest mistake fascism made was to turn against the Israelite. If fascism had absorbed the Israelite, if fascism had said to the Israelite: Come, let us join forces, then fascism would still be a vital movement, it would be the most important movement in Europe. - Arnon Grunberg, The Jewish Messiah An intellectual movement rejecting Jews is like a basketball team rejecting blacks. So why do does the far right spurn the Semite? It's not that Jews, by definition, are adverse to fascism. A Jew was a member of the first Fascist Grand Council, more than 230 Jews marched on Rome with Mussolini and Mussolini's early mistress and collaborator, Margherita Sarfatti , was a Jewess. Revisionist Zionist Abba Achimeir wrote a column entitled "From the Notebook of a Fascist" and hailed Jabotinsky as his Duce . Only when Mussolini allied with Hitler did the far right turn inextricably to anti-Semitism. Jews are suspicious to their nationalist countrymen due to their real or per...

It was not the Jewish people that crucified Christ. The common people followed that vagabond Pharisee and loved to hear him. Weeping, they accompanied him to the foot of the cross to which the Romans had nailed him and on which they had placed an inscription jeering at the Jews. But the Jewish people, who had loved and cherished the wandering revolutionary, refused to recognize in him that God which the Greeks and the Romans desired to impose on him. - Bernard Lazare, Notes on a Conversion I love Jesus too much to make of him a Christ.