Jews and Gentiles

The extension of rights to the Jews was one of the great achievements of the French Revolution, and Rosenstock-Huessy moves from a discussion of the resulting Jewish enthusiasm for liberalism to a digression dealing with the relation of Jews and Gentiles in history. It is titled “Alpha and Omega,” and this link of protology and eschatology will become important for what he has to say about the continuing role of the Jews in the Christian era.

France emancipated the Jews. But this was “no absolute solution.” There is still an “objective problem,” which remains even after Jews are thoroughly protected by equal civil rights. The problem is a theological one. But Rosenstock-Huessy does not think of it as a problem in the sense that it needs to be solved, or eliminated. Jews have had and continue to have a central role in the Christian era.

He points out that Christianity was received as a historical reality, rather than a myth, because of the existence of the Jews: “Without their existence, the gospel of Jesus might have come to the Gentiles like a myth or a legend.” The continuing existence of the Jew plays the same role: They “bar the nations from a relapse into that comfortable self-adoration which makes Jesus himself into a blond Germanic hero instead of a despised Jew.”

Jews, he says, have been heavily involved in trade because it is the business “least prejudicial to their mission.” Jews are “removed from the soil which leads Gentiles to idolize tools of human government, earth, agriculture, countries and cities and machines, and set them up as Gods.” The very formlessness, unrootedness, of Judaism helps it to retain its priestly character. The Jews are not called, he says, to form “an earthly political order, a national organization, a worldly culture,” but rather to be “coals in the heart of the fire, powerless in the hands of God.” They are not called to exercise power, but to be a constant warning against the dangers of power.

Jews are not servants of time like pagans, but believe in “Eternity.” They endure when the world is collapsing around them, and this is what makes anti-Semitism so common in the aftermath of a lost war: “The Jews must be guilty . . . for are they not as ready to shoulder hard times without a complaint as they were to profit in the good?” He describes Jewish character in terms of restlessness, a certain “too much”: “Too much charity, too much smartness, too much understanding, too much devotion, too much self-denial, too much egotism, are the Jewish eccentricities and dangers.”

We can understand nothing o the world, he says, unless we see that mankind is divided into pagans, Christians, and Jews, which are like the “three tenses of grammar, past, resent, and future, or like beginning, middle, and end.” The French Revolution abolished all these in the name of common union in Adam. He points to the fact that the Christian calendar, and Christian time, is a “creative way out of the indissoluble dilemma between Jewish hope and pagan faith.”

He means the connections between these three divisions of mankind and the beginning, middle, and end quite literally. Hatred toward Jews is “the hatred of the beginning of things for the end.” The Hebrews force paganism, at the beginning, to see things in the light of the end, and this spoils the pagan outlook from the beginning. Once you’ve seen things from the end, you can’t go back to looking at it from the beginning. Or, to put it another way: “In the Bible God is called the Alpha and Omega. But we are seldom conscious of the fact that he has created the natural nations of men in His power as Alpha and the Jews in his power as Omega.” The Jews represent the end within history, before the end; and it’s only because of their presence that paganism got anywhere. As the Omega community, “The Jewish community, as a community, was created by God to be his witness against the blindness of the Alpha-nations.” Pagan civilizations were formed to set up bulwarks against the view from the end, against the Omega-nation.

This again provides a perspective on anti-Semitism. The pogrom is an attempt “to throw off the yoke which joins Alpha and Omega.” When an old regime is dying, in its death throws, it attempts to defend itself (Alpha) by persecuting the Jews, who are “the eternal symbol of a life beyond any existing form of government.” Persecution of the Jews is a border-fight, not among neighbors in space but among neighbors in time. During the Reformation, attacks on the Jews kept the old Catholic system working for another 50 years – the Jews were the “lightning-rod that protected Papacy.”

Jews are not only witnesses to a messianic future, but permanent witnesses against idolatry: “The genius of Greece of any pagan nation always tries to blossom and bear fruit so divinely that people forget everything except itself. It is intoxicating to live the life of natural growth.” This creates a “permanent hostility between worshippers of the birth of forms and the beauty of things and worshippers of the living God, with his fire burning high above the shapelessness of man’s soul.” Jews also continue to exist as a witness to Christians who “grow weak in their faith, hope, and love.” Then Judaism exists to repair the divergence between the “glowing nucleus of revelation and the inanimate forms of creation.”

Rosenstock-Huessy digresses from his digression to talk about the way the French took over the Messianism of Judaism. And he spends a few pages discussing the Dreyfus affair, a chilling warning about the limits of Jewish assimilation in France. L’affaire demonstrated that “emancipation was granted before assimilation existed,” and it led some Jews to conclude that assimilation had failed.

The emancipation of the Jews in the French Revolution forever changed the character of the place of Jews in the Christian era. It shows that the Jew, like everyone else, was first of all a natural man. The same “movement which restored Hellas and Rome, Philosophy and Law” also “made the history of Jews and pagans one tradition.” A new Europe emerged as Jerusalem and Athens “blended and mixed the powers which had ruined the ancient world by their isolation.” Through this blending, European nations came to believe that every nation had a mission, just as the Jews had: “Messianism, originally limited to the Jews, later communicated to the heathen by the Church, is transferred by the European nationalism born in 1789 to the nations in general, which now enter upon a common race of messianic nationalism.”

In itself this is “ridiculous arrogance,” but it becomes reasonable “through the emancipation of the Jews”: “by the addition of the element of Omega, the chosen people of God, the ‘Aphaic’ nations have acquired one touch of finality and predestination.” Nations since 1789 are completely different from nations before the Revolution; not the nation is “a task, not a fact, a movement, not an established house, a future and not a past.” The presence of the Jews prevents nations from “backsliding and mistaking mere existence for growth, inheritance for heritage, Alpha for Omega.” National literatures came to be seen as “canons,” having an inspiration analogous to that of the Bible. Thus, “the unleashing of a competitive race in national inspiration filled the gap created by the disappearance of the ‘Omegaic’ nation.” The modern cult of aesthetics is a product of the infusion of Judaism’s messianism into the wi

der European culture. This means that we live in a new era where “the functions of Gentiles, Christians, and Jews are no longer invested in a visible race, a visible clergy, and a visible Israel. In the future the character and function of a man can no loner be judged by the outside sign of race, creed, or country.” These three forms of life are available to everyone everywhere.

This history, he argues, “shows how deeply the history of Christianity delves its channels even where neither church nor dogma, neither pope nor parsons, still play any part in the drama. Pagans, Christians, and Jews carry out the commands of revelation long after these commands have ceased to be represented by a clergy.”

In a letter of October 4, 1916 to Rosenzweig, Rosenstock-Huessy wrote, “I see Judaism just as you prescribe it to the ‘Church’ – and to yourself – as for me, the revelation of God in the world from day to day, from being a mere abstract, metaphorical conception in the background, becomes more and more a present reality here and now. The Jews are so much the chosen people, and the Old Testament is so much the book of the law of the Father, just as the New is the book of the love of the children (Abraham and Christ, sacrifice the two poles, on the one hand the Father, on the other the Son), that altogether the Church needs ‘its’ Jews to strengthen its own truth. The stubbornness of the Jews is, so to speak, a Christian dogma.”