States of Exile

From the Forward : In 1965 Cioran wrote “I am metaphysically Jewish,” which he followed in 1969 with: “The only people I relate to deeply are Jews. We share the same imperfections.” His further metaphysical reflection in 1970, “The refusal of Christianity by the Jews can only be termed brilliant,” is topped by the following mordant ethical critique of European character: “The only good folks in Germany were Jews. Now that they are dead, all that remains is a kind of monstrous Belgium.” "Metaphysical Judaism" is a nebulous category of being, overlapping with but not synonymous with "physical Judaism." If we ascribe to the Kabbalistic notion of gilgul , we could say Cioran was a Jew in a previous life. We could also say all "metaphysical Jews" were Jews in a previous life, and "physical Jews" should proselytize them.

“Interiorization is not a dividing line between ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’: it signifies a crisis within Jewish eschatology itself--in Pauline Christianity as well as in the Sabbatian movement of the seventeenth century. How else,” Taubes asks, “can redemption be defined after the Messiah has failed to redeem the external world except by turning inward?” Jacob Taubes, a man beyond petty distinctions between left and right, theism and atheism, is an enigma after my own heart : I discussed Taubes’s attraction to one of the leaders of the radical right wing in Israel, Geula Cohen. As Taubes’s own letters to Hugo Bergman demonstrate, it is impossible to separate his libidinal interest in her from his theopolitical curiosity regarding the Zionist 'political messianism.' I too have a hard time separating libidinal interest from theopolitical curiosity. The eschaton is a delayed orgasm, and the creative tension till that point is reached (internally or externally) is what drives th...

If Jesus were alive today, the Arabs would want to drive him into the sea.

Franck Salameh writes : Arab nationalism was never the strong suit of Egyptians; at least not the Egyptians outside the gilded gates of the military and the autocrats. For the average Egyptian, Arabism remained extraneous and superficial at best, pragmatically, not ideologically driven. Until his dying day, Taha Husayn (1889-1973), considered by many the doyen of modern Arabic literature—and for some time the Arab nationalists’ and Sati’ al-Husri’s bête noire of choice—scorned the faintest notion of an “Arab Egyptian” identity. He held Egypt’s roots to be Pharaonic, not Arab; maintained Egyptian culture and mentality to be closer to the ways of modern Greeks, Italians and Frenchmen than to those of Arabs; and considered his own use of the Arabic language to be immaterial and irrelevant to his Egyptian authenticity. . . . There were others still, besides Husayn and al-Sayyid, in Lebanon, in Syria, and Iraq; Middle Eastern intellectuals who celebrated diversity, and poured sharp criticis...

We impute to the 'Jew' an impossible, unfathomable enjoyment, allegedly stolen from us. - Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do Believers in the myth of the happy Jew, high off of life-energy stolen from Gentiles, need to read more Kafka. "There is infinite hope, but not for us." Sabbatai Zevi, the "false" messiah, was bipolar (according to Gershom Scholem). Otto Weininger, king of the misogynists, committed suicide (although that may have been his Germanic genes kicking in). Nietzsche complained that Jesus "only knew the tears and the melancholy of the Hebrew." Finally I will quote Leo Strauss's statement on the Jewish mission in history: "The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption."

... should be the old Near East. Morocco = Mauretania Algeria/Tunisia = Numidia Libya = Carthage Egypt = Egypt (not "Arab Republic of Egypt") Sudan = Cush Somalia = Punt Israel = Israel Palestine = Philistia Lebanon = Phoenicia Turkey = Greater Armenia Iraq = Assyria Syria = Aram Jordan = Nabatea Saudi Arabia = Arabia Iran = Persia

Cush shall soon stretch out her hands to God. - Psalms 68:31 From Haaretz : JUBA, South Sudan - The kibbutz movement is dying? Don't tell Emmanuel Logoro. "I have a dream," he says, sitting in his hut near a plastic Christmas tree that he brought home from Eilat, and taking out a briefcase filled with diagrams of a kibbutz's organizational structure. "I have plans." . . . The Logoro family loved Israel - but came back to South Sudan. "This is our home, after all," explains Emmanuel to his son Logoro, who was born at Yoseftal Medical Center in Eilat, sitting on his lap. "We are about to be an independent country and there are things for us to do here." Like start a kibbutz? "And why not?" asks Logoro. "We have the land, the rain, the people. It will unite us and take us forward, just as the Jews of Europe came together to pray, eat, work and develop their land ... What is better than a kibbutz, I ask you?" Am Cush Cha...