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This is the first book to explore the role of quotation in modern Jewish thought. Weaving back and forth from Benjamin to Rosenzweig, the book searches for the recovery of concealed and lost meaning in the community of letters, sacred scripture, the collecting of books, storytelling, and the life of liturgy. It also explores how the legacy of Goethe can be used to develop new strata of religious and Jewish thought. We learn how quotation is the binding tissue that links language and thought, modernity and tradition, religion and secularism as a way of being in the world.
Author:
This is the first book to explore the role of quotation in modern Jewish thought. Weaving back and forth from Benjamin to Rosenzweig, the book searches for the recovery of concealed and lost meaning in the community of letters, sacred scripture, the collecting of books, storytelling, and the life of liturgy. It also explores how the legacy of Goethe can be used to develop new strata of religious and Jewish thought. We learn how quotation is the binding tissue that links language and thought, modernity and tradition, religion and secularism as a way of being in the world.
Author:
The second chapter explores Benjamin’s and Rosenzweig’s views on language and its relationship to life, thought, myth, and the origins of tradition. Before one may understand respective views on quotation, it is important to consider their views on language. In particular, this chapter examines how Martin Buber’s early views on language, tradition, Zionism, and the German quality of Innerlichkeit not only evoked strong, creative reactions from both thinkers, but also shaped how they viewed language and its relationship to tradition. The chapter also examines these thinkers’ Romantic move to link language and thought, as well as their views on the so-called unity of languages and the recovery of a proto-language. Both argue that translation, for example, is a recovery of a proto-language. Their positions, we learn, function similarly to Mann’s “life of quotation” in that Rosenzweig and Benjamin, in their desire to challenge Buber’s cultural Zionism and Herman Cohen’s philosophical rationalism, sought to establish a distinct Jewish identity though language.
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The conclusion explores the political and philosophical implication of this study. Jacques Derrida’s challenge to philosophical thinking remains fundamental to the vicissitudes of the genre and discipline of modern Jewish thought: Any critical engagement with Western literary or philosophical culture ineluctably must account for the phenomena of literary theory. Here I turn to the work of Vilém Flusser who investigates how writing determines and engages temporality in relation to technology and the move toward the digital. His work also labors to address the rise of information technology. Flusser’s work is important to how we study and engage language. He vehemently disagreed with Derrida that writing provides the temporal template for all media. For Flusser, Derrida could not account for the myriad differences separating media in culture, nor could he account for the rise of information technology and the digitization of texts. In fact, for Flusser, the salient flaw in Derrida’s view of writing is that deconstruction simply does not address the conceptual chasm separating a culture that values writing from a culture that values images. Taking seriously Flusser’s critique, I argue that Benjamin and Rosenzweig’s views on language and quotation are in a better position to build a bridge over this chasm.
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In this chapter we learn how Benjamin employs “Jewish” quotation to address secular concerns. Most scholarship on the life and thought of Walter Benjamin does not seriously engage the phenomenon of religion or the philosophy of religion in his thought. While some scholarship considers Benjamin a German-Jewish thinker, placed in the company of luminaries such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem, most readers assume that Benjamin’s secular identity motivated his inquiries and critical thinking. However, focusing on a secular sensibility obscures important elements of religious traditions in Benjamin’s writings. In fact, Benjamin suggested that widely contemporary institutions like capitalism, art, and even at times science contained poignant traces of religion and religious thought. This chapter examines these traces by revisiting his montage of quotation, which I argue is where we see the most salient examples of the use of Judaism in Benjamin’s thought. His desire to secularize life was inexorably related to his interpretations of experience and of Judaism. We learn that not only did Benjamin, in fact, use Jewish theological language and imagery through his montage of quotation, but that he also used this method to secularize contemporary theological-political-aesthetic paradigms. Further, this method— primarily understood through his idiosyncratic use of Jewish imagery—is critical to the writing of history.
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The fourth chapter explores Rosenzweig’s early turn to language and its transformation into a “Jewish” mode of quotation. I argue that quotation played an integral role in Rosenzweig’s philosophical methodology. While writing the Star in the trenches of World War I, Rosenzweig devised his system of philosophy without the benefit of a library, relying on memory to recall passages from the literary canons of both the Jewish and German traditions. He quoted extensively from Scripture; Midrash; Talmud; medieval Jewish exegesis, philosophy, and poetry; and the Hebrew prayer book, as well as from the classical literature cherished by the German Bildungsburgertum. These quotations served a pedagogical function: Rosenzweig hoped to teach a Jewish worldview by challenging a classical German one. Because his contemporaries were accomplished readers of Goethe, Rosenzweig used their affinity toward and knowledge of this great literary figure to teach an innovative return to Jewish tradition grounded in language. We will find that, in a counter-intuitive fashion, Rosenzweig quoted the work of Goethe to revalorize contemporary Judaism.
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In the sixth chapter, we learn how a liturgical life best characterizes Rosenzweig’s Jewish method of quotation. When Rosenzweig was preparing the work for publication in 1921, he chose not to set off his citations in quotation marks or footnote them with bibliographic data. Presumably, then, they go unnoticed by the reader unfamiliar with this literature. However, Rosenzweig made a request to his research assistant, Nahum Glatzer, in 1929 that for the second edition of the Star he included at the end of the book a list of the citations from Jewish sources that help the reader identify these references. This chapter unpacks the claim that during the eight-year period in between these two works, Rosenzweig understood a “Jewish method” of quotation in the Star to be related to this overall argument. Glatzer’s list, thus, reflected a new theological revalorization of the Star. Before his death, Rosenzweig understood the “Jewish method” undergirding his philosophical treatise to be a premodern Jewish method of quotation—Musivstil—as well as one based on Jewish liturgy. In many ways, Rosenzweig re-read his own work through the lens of a lived Jewish life in the face of immanent death. Method for him was not simply a method, but involved living a Jewish liturgical life.
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The third chapter considers Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay on Karl Kraus and explores how Benjamin uses Kraus (who was Theodor Lessing’s classical example of a self-hating Jew) to explain how Jewish theology can be transformed into secular Jewish cultural identity through quotation. Benjamin does this by focusing on what he believes to be the “Jewish” style of quotation in Kraus’s writing, or what George Steiner has termed a “hermeneutic of citation.” This chapter illustrates how Walter Benjamin translates his early turn to language into a “Jewish” notion of quotation in his essay on Kraus.
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