The End of Judaism

One cannot understand the meaning of what is taking place in Israel today if one does not understand that Zionism constitutes a double negation of the historical reality of Judaism. Not only does it in fact transfer to the Jews the nation-state of Christians, but Zionism represents the culmination of that process of assimilation which, since the late 18th century, has been gradually canceling Jewish identity. Decisively, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has shown in an exemplary study, at the foundation of Zionist consciousness lies another negation, the negation of Galut, that is, of exile as a principle common to all historical forms of Judaism as we know it. The premises of this conception of exile predate the destruction of the Second Temple and are already present in biblical literature. Exile is the very form of Jewish existence on Earth, and the entire Jewish tradition — from the Mishnah to the Talmud, from the architecture of the synagogue to the memory of biblical events — was conceived and lived from the perspective of exile. For an Orthodox Jew, Jews living in the state of Israel are also in exile. And the state according to the Torah, which Jews await upon the coming of the Messiah, has nothing to do with a modern nation-state, so much so that at its core lie precisely the rebuilding of the Temple and the restoration of sacrifices, which the state of Israel does not even want to hear about. 

And we should not forget that exile according to Judaism is not only the condition of the Jews, but concerns the deficient condition of the world as a whole. According to some Kabbalists, including Luria, exile defines the very situation of divinity, which created the world by exiling itself from itself, and this exile will last until the advent of Tiqqun, that is, the restoration of the original order.

It is precisely this unconditional acceptance of exile, with the rejection it entails of all present forms of statehood, that establishes the superiority of Jews over religions and peoples who have compromised with the state. Jews are, along with the Roma, the only people who have rejected the state form, conducted no wars, and never stained themselves with the blood of other peoples.

In its fundamental denial of exile and diaspora in favor of a nation-state, Zionism has therefore betrayed the very essence of Judaism. Small wonder then that this removal produced another exile, that of the Palestinians, and led the state of Israel to identify itself with the most extreme and ruthless forms of the modern nation-state. The tenacious claim of history, from which the Diaspora according to Zionists would have excluded Jews, points in the same direction. But this may mean that Judaism, which had not died at Auschwitz, perhaps meets its end today.

First published September 30 2024 in Una voca Translated by Ill Will

Images: Paolo Pellegrin