THE IRRITANT:
The Judaism of George Steiner (J. J. Kimche, December 1, 2020, First Things)
Steiner’s portrayal of Judaism is unusual for a modern secularist, in that it defends an essentialist view of Jewishness, arguing that certain immutable qualities define and anchor Jewishness across its historical and cultural permutations. Yet Steiner dismisses the usual hallmarks posited by other essentialist Jewish thinkers: claims of racial, religious, ethical, or national uniqueness. His brilliant and disturbing essay on the subject, “Our Homeland, The Text” (1985), argues that the Jew, like the biblical patriarchs, lives a life of self-exclusion. Spurning society, nature, and passion, the Jew seeks closeness with a transcendent God, which translates practically into a withdrawal from all social and temporal spaces. The Jew has no earthly home; alienation, wandering, self-isolation, and retreat into a vortex of exponentially expanding texts are the essence of Jewishness. The textual canon is the true home of every Jew, and every commentary is a return. This textual Judaism repudiates all attempts to place political, nationalistic, ritualistic, or racial components at its core. The Kingdom of David, the Bar-Kochba Revolt, and Zionism are dismissed as antithetical to true Judaism, whose textual nature underpins its migratory, multilingual, and cosmopolitan attributes.
This view of Judaism lends itself to an ethically based exceptionalism. The Jew, in Steiner’s eyes, is always a stranger, ceaselessly migrating through countries, cultures, and languages, always—and this is the central metaphor—a guest in another’s home. The eternally exiled nation exemplifies Geworfenheit (“thrownness,” a Heideggerian term for the existential disposition of being thrust into an environment of neither one’s fashioning nor one’s choosing), thus teaching the rest of humanity the value of living as “guests of life and truth.” It is this aspect of their existence, this disposition forced on them by the vicissitudes of history, that lends the Jews their ethical superiority. The oppressed, bookish, unworldly Jews are superior, contends Steiner, because they have never subjugated another people, never soiled themselves with national realpolitik, never subjected their enemies to the rack or the firing squad. A Jew is one who treads lightly in every circumstance, who treats all with the deference due to a host, whose presence jolts all societies from the pursuit of ethnic or cultural homogeneity. The Jew is the world’s moral irritant, the exemplar of suffering and otherness that gives the human conscience no rest. Through this eternal restlessness, both physical and moral, the Jews actualize their mission unto humanity—a role Steiner terms “an honor beyond honors.”
This paradigm motivates Steiner’s non-Zionism. If the mission of the Jews is bound up with their eternal role as guest, if their moral purity is acquired at the price of rootlessness and displacement, then any attempt to settle is a repudiation of Jewishness. Nationalism is thus an impoverishment of the Jewish spirit, a betrayal of the principles that fueled all prior spiritual and intellectual accomplishments. Zionism can never be forgiven for normalizing the Jew, for introducing political expediency, racial discrimination, and territoriality into Jewish history. Nothing could be more degrading for the people of Isaiah and Spinoza than to sink to the level of Jezebel and Herod, exchanging parchment and pedagogy for ministers and missiles. Despite his grudging admission that Israel has proven necessary for the physical protection of the Jews (a “sad miracle”), disappointment over the Jews’ turn from itinerant scribes to nation-building settlers pervades Steiner’s writings. Like the Hebraic prophets of old, Steiner castigates his fellow Jews for reneging on their historical mission and betraying their raison d’être.